


Ocean to Ocean

by IfItHollers



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Aquaman, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Aquaman!AU, Canon-Typical Violence, Dementia, Families of Choice, Multi, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ramsay is His Own Warning, References to canon dialogue, Road Trips, Rowing Jokes, Secret Identity, Stress vomiting, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, alligator ex machina, an alligator - Freeform, an army of alligators, flash flooding, historian Robb Stark, one really big trout, professor Stannis Baratheon, the Myraham, veteran Jon Snow, veterinarian Gendry Waters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2019-09-29 17:03:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IfItHollers/pseuds/IfItHollers
Summary: When Balon Greyjoy raised his reavers to attack the surface, Queen Alannys Harlaw fled the Iron Kingdom with her last surviving son and raised him on dry land.Sixteen years later, Theon Greyjoy tries to throw himself back. Too bad he picked the middle of an underwater succession crisis to do it.





	1. All the Tides Against You

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, I saw Aquaman 2 nights ago and today I went to the aquarium, and this is the product of that. It's a work in progress that relies on the Aquaman (2018) movie for the overarching plot structure, with influence from ASOIAF's kingsmoot, Ironborn mythology, and characterization of the Greyjoys. In this fic, the Ironborn function largely as Atlanteans, bipedal water-breathing humanoids capable of superhuman swimming ability, breathing and speech underwater, and incredible resistance to harm. The Ironborn's injuries heal in saltwater and they are able to sense when one of their own enters the water. I have never read any of the Aquaman DC comics and Theon is unaffiliated with any Justice League, which is why this fic is not tagged for the Aquaman fandom. If you have any questions about the Ironborn's abilities in this fic, please feel free to ask in the comments.  
>    
> Content warnings: 
> 
> In this 'verse, Theon has just escaped Ramsay and is pretty typically suicidal for a post-Ramsay Theon. This chapter contains a suicide attempt by drowning. If this would be detrimental for you to read, please feel free to give this story a miss. I'm rating it mature for that reason.
> 
> Also in this chapter is a nonspecific portrayal of early- to mid-stage dementia. The are not discussed in detail and no diagnoses are offered. My own experiences with dementia were never in a full-time caretaker role, so I am not and do not claim to be informed on this subject. Again, if you are not comfortable reading about general memory loss and unspecified cognitive processing issues, please do what's best for your own state of mind.
> 
> With these things in mind, happy reading!

Sixteen years ago, Alannys Harlaw turned up on the end of Davos Seaworth’s dock, clutching her youngest child in her arms.

Theon remembers it, vaguely—his mother just about throwing him up onto the planks, his first gasp of air and the water streaming out of gills on his throat, the way his mother’s arms slapped the wet wood. She hauled herself up after him and they lay there for hours, Theon bracketed in her hold and staring at the water between the boards. The sun came up, and Davos came out.

Theon’s first memory of a surface dweller is the gray-bearded man charging toward them at the end of the dock, followed by his mother flipping upright and snarling at him. Davos froze and held his hands up, and looked at the blood still gleaming on the dock.

“Ma’am, are you hurt? Is your son hurt?”

Alannys snarled at him, holding Theon so that her body was between her child and the threat. After what happened in the Iron Kingdom, she wouldn’t come to either Davos or Stannis, but she came for Marya. And once Marya had confirmed that the wound was no longer bleeding, and there was no reason any of her children would be frightened, she brought them out.

Theon had never seen so many children in one place, and he’d never been one of the bigger ones before. And there was no more reason to be afraid.

くコ:彡

Davos comes and finds him at the end of the dock at sunrise. Theon sits with his ruined feet pulled up under him, his arms looped around his knees. He’s almost naked, because his clothes nearly disintegrated in that basement, but it doesn’t matter. Davos put the first clothes on Theon’s back—an oversize Seaworth’s Onion Shack t-shirt and a pair of Allard’s khaki shorts. Davos raised him alongside his children and Stannis’s in one ludicrous school of fish.

“Lad, what happened to you?”

Theon turns, reaches out toward Davos, and splays the remaining three fingers on his right hand.

“Will she know me to see me, do you think?” he asks.

Davos reaches out with his left hand and grabs Theon’s, careful with the wounds at the amputation sites. “Your mother made you a place in this world. She’ll know you come hell or high water.”

“It is both,” Theon says. “Or it will be. I swear it.”

Davos looks at Theon’s missing and broken teeth. “I know what you and your mother are capable of. If you get in the water, you can heal. I don’t know if you’ll get your fingers back, but you can stop the pain.”

“If I get in the water I won’t come back,” Theon says. “That’s why I’m here.”

Davos releases Theon’s hand and touches his shoulder. It’s an abbreviated clap on the shoulder, gentle because Theon’s lost three stone and he looks and feels as though he could shatter apart.

“You’re a man grown. Come inside, see your mother. Put some food in your belly.”

“Can’t eat,” Theon says. “He took my teeth.”

“Did he take your memory, or have you never eaten soup at my table?”

Theon shudders. “You don’t know the half of it.”

くコ:彡

The lighting in the Seaworth kitchen at dawn is bad, and it always has been. There’s something painfully familiar about it, as he sits at Davos’s table and eats whitefish chowder. It’s disgusting to be eating chowder this early in the morning. It’s the best food Theon can remember eating.

Alannys comes out of the bedroom in her nightgown, arms wrapped around herself. Theon freezes with his spoon in his hand, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She moves slowly. Years of being out of the water have left her brittle.

Fingers reach out and comb through his hair, and Theon does not flinch.

“My baby,” she says. “I knew you’d come back.”

Over the years, when Theon grew old enough to understand, he realized he wasn’t always sure who slept where in the Seaworth house. Davos was able to coax her into eating, Marya listened when she spoke of her lost sons, Stannis sat up with her in rigid silence when she woke in the night. Theon shared a room with Allard Seaworth and Stannis’s nephew, and if it was cramped, he never wanted for company. Nobody ever held him facedown in a bucket or broke a bottle on him. So he let people refer to Davos and Stannis interchangeably as his father, and Marya as his mother, and the Seaworth boys and Gendry Baratheon his brothers. If his mother wanted to marry three separate people, at least he liked them. That was more than he could say for what he remembered of Balon Greyjoy.

“Mother,” he says, though he does not dare turn toward her, not with how he looks.

She sits down beside him on the bench seat and leans her head on his shoulder. “You’ve gotten so tall. Not a little boy.”

“No, Mother.”

She touches his hair. Hers is so white it glows like moonlight now in the blue early morning; his has gone gray. “You look like your father,” she says. “But your eyes were always like mine. Now…” She turns his face toward hers and frowns slightly. “Now they’re something different.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He stirs his soup, averting his gaze.

She spreads her hand over his cheek, and he ignores the ache in his upper jaw.

“I brought you here because I thought it would hurt less,” she murmurs. “I didn’t mean to do this to you.”

“You didn’t,” he says.

She releases his face and takes his hand. The left one is only missing one finger; she rolls the remaining digits across her palm and then laces her fingers through his. “It’s my fault.”

“It’s not. It’s really not,” he says. The soup is hot and filling but he can only hold so much.

“It’s my fault,” she repeats. “And you’ve come to say goodbye to me.”

For a terrible moment he thinks she’s going to cry. Instead she just tucks her head onto his shoulder again.

“It was never your fault,” he says. “You did the best you could. And your best was pretty good, Mother.” He swallows. “Are you happy here, Mother?”

She lifts her head. “Hmm?”

“Are you happy here?”

She looks at him for several long moments and then says, “When did you get here? It's been so long.”

He looks at her, at the genuine pleasure on her face, and squeezes her hand with what strength he has. “Davos invited me for breakfast, Mother.”

“Oh, that was nice of him. Shall I make up your old bed? Are you staying?”

He hates to crush her smile. “No, I’m not staying. I’m going home, actually.”

She sighs. “Oh, that’s right. You’re no green boy anymore. You should eat a little more, get your strength up.” She continues holding his hand.

He does his best.

くコ:彡 

At some point Alannys reports that she feels dizzy and goes to lay down. Davos sets about making her something to eat, frying eggs.

“Normally it’s worse when the sun goes down,” he says. “But her sleep's been bad for a while. She’s just a little disoriented all of the time now.”

“For how long?”

“Don’t you remember when you were a kid?” Davos flicks water on the skillet and listens to it sizzle. Theon’s stomach rolls and he says nothing, choking down the nausea. “You’d say, ‘I’m going to Robb’s house.’ And she’d ask, ‘Where are you going?’ I remember once you were almost out the door, and she said, ‘But where are you going? How are you getting there?’”

Theon swallows. “I thought she just wasn’t listening.”

Because what he’d done, in response, was turn to her and wrap his hand around her wrist, and ask, “Where am I going, Mother?”

She frowned and then said, after a moment of thought, “To Robb’s house.”

“How am I getting there?”

“You’re walking.”

“She’s a little young for it, but it’s not unheard of.” Davos cracks an egg on the side of the skillet and then spills the yolk into the center. “It’s lucky there’s so many of us, actually. Marya’s home when I’m at the restaurant, Stannis is home when Marya’s out running errands, I’m home when Stannis is grading papers. So if she gets confused we can help out. We took her to a clinic, but they weren’t very receptive when she started talking about your hometown. Skewed their baseline for her a bit.” He cracks another egg. “But we know what she’s like. Just needs reminders, and those timer locks on her pill bottles. And she loves Dale's little one, happy to help with the baby.”

“You’ll take care of her?”

Davos looks over his shoulder at Theon and then turns back to the stove. “Yeah, we’ll take care of her. My boys call her Lanny. She’ll never be alone, she’s part of the family.” He adjusts the skillet. “You’re part of the family too, lad.”

Theon says nothing and looks at the surface of the table.

“Did I tell you how I lost my fingers?”

And that was what convinced Theon, at last, to go home, instead of just taking Gendry’s rowboat from the dock and letting them all think it had come untethered in the night. He knew, somehow, that Davos Seaworth of all men would not turn him away. Would not avert his eyes and ask him to leave. Davos Seaworth would look straight at his wounds and tell him how awful he looked, and he would be kind in doing it.

“You said it was a boat propeller.”

“It was a boat propeller,” he says. “Took them all off in one swipe at the top joint. The doctors said I was marvelous lucky. I was reaching for this kid—he was nineteen, never been on a boat before, could barely swim, and he fell overboard. I saw him and I knew he was just moments from getting caught up. I just—reached out, because the alternative was him dying in front of me.”

Theon says nothing.

Davos turns around. “And I’m telling you, Theon. I’m reaching out to you now. I don’t know what happened to you, I don't know where you went. But I am thankful every day when I see that man and his children in my house. I have never regretted reaching out. And I’ve never regretted putting a roof over yours and your mother’s heads. I will continue to be right here for as long as I’m alive, and when I’m gone my boys will be right here to do the same. Please tell me you’ll be one of them.”

Theon continues to stare at the table. “It was Stannis?”

“It was Stannis,” Davos agrees. “If he’d died at nineteen—think of the man he never would have become.”

Stannis proofread Theon’s papers in high school, drove him to the DMV for his license test, and dragged him out of the house on the weekends for Gendry’s rowing competitions. And Shireen, the only girl in the house full of testosterone, used to stand in the doorway to Theon’s room and demand that he come play princesses with her, because he was a real prince and he knew how to do it right. She was more a sister to him than any knob-kneed girl of Balon Greyjoy’s body.

Better she not see him before he goes. He might upset her.

"I’ve become something else already, Davos,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

くコ:彡

He leaves when Davos takes Alannys’s eggs to her. He suspects Davos knows he’s going to do it, but Davos is also giving him a surprising amount of dignity. Maybe he hopes that by being a role model to him, Theon will change his mind.

Theon’s going to go while he has enough mind to stick to his decision.

He goes back to the end of the dock—where he first arrived in the world, as much his place of birth as any. He steels himself. He extends his arms over his head. He dives into the water.

His plan is to swim out as inefficiently as he can stand, using none of the power his heritage brings him. He’s too tired for that—he would burn through the energy Davos’s food gave him in a few seconds—and his exhaustion will be his undoing. He won’t take Gendry’s boat, won’t inconvenience them any more than he already has. He’ll just swim until he can’t anymore, and then he’ll just let go.

He just needs to get far enough out that the tide can’t wash him back out onto the shore. Because if his mother finds him… it’s better if she never knows what happened to him. Better if she never remembers him at all.

No one else will, no matter what Davos says. They'll be better off for it.

The aches in his hands and feet and the burn along the broken skin slowly fade, replaced by the burn of exertion in his arms and legs. It’s actually the best he’s felt in… longer than he can remember. This is the first time he’s been in control of it. This is the first time he’s been able to decide when it ends.

He swims for what feels like hours, but his sense of time is skewed. Eventually he comes to a halt and lets himself float, then treads water, looking in every direction for the shore. He can’t see it—not even the speck that should be Davos’s lighthouse.

Good. Just a little further.

Which is when something grabs him by the ankle and yanks him under the water.

He gasps and water floods his mouth, into his lungs. It hurts at first, the shock inside him after all these years. His eyes open and burn too, before they adjust to the green light.

There’s a woman staring at him. Her short dark hair lifts away from her forehead. She has glowing golden eyes over a big sharp nose in her thin face.

He kicks to try and shake her off—his mother said they’d killed her sons—but she digs her nails into the skin of his ankle and after all this time—it was supposed to be over. It was supposed to be over.

He lunges for her, trying to grab her by the arms—make her finish it quickly. He can see a flash of silver—a dirk around her neck on a cord. She wraps her arms around him, her strength crushing, and he can’t do this again, he just can’t.

And then they are moving. She’s swimming and dragging him with him, faster than humans can, as only the Ironborn can swim. He has to close his eyes for all the bubbles and foam, and he hears himself saying, “No! No!” over and over again, but she’s not listening.

The next thing he knows he is flying through the air, the way a father might throw his child. He lands hard on the sand, the wind knocked out of him. Water flows from his mouth and the sides of his throat. The salt stings. Ramsay cut him there and laughed when he did it.

He pounds his fist on the sand and it is the perfect representation of his own futility.

Feet thud on the wet sand beside him. He doesn’t look up at the woman.

“Who are you?”

She has a sharp voice. She puts her foot on his stomach and makes him look up at her.

“No one,” he says, covering his eyes.

“You are the blood of Quellon Greyjoy. But you’re an old man. Who are you?”

“I’m nobody!”

“How did you come to be here?”

He says nothing and lets his arms flop to his side.

“What’s your name?”

He can’t do this again.

She prods him with a toe. The nail is sharp. “I could feel you as soon as you set foot in the water. Who are you?”

“Let me die,” he mumbles. He doesn’t know if she hears him.

Her toe goes tap, tap against his stomach. “Are you Quenton? Donel?”

“Let me die.”

“Robin? Some bastard?”

“Let me die!” he shouts. “I’m Theon! Theon Greyjoy! You should have left me!”

She is quiet for a moment. She withdraws her foot.

“Liar,” she says.

He twists away from her, curling up on his side. “You should have left me,” he whispers.

“You lie. You lie!” He hears her moving around him, but his eyes are shut. “Theon Greyjoy is dead. He died with Queen Alannys. Sixteen years ago.”

“He died a year ago, on the surface, alone. I’m just trying to finish the job.”

She grabs him by the hair and yanks his head back. “Open your eyes. Open your eyes!”

He does. Out of the water her eyes are dark, and her face is hard. She stares at him for several long moments and then releases him.

“You can’t drown,” she says. “No matter how long it’s been since you were in the water. Even if you look like your heart would burst. Who did this to you?”

“Nobody.”

“Liar.” She kicks him in the ribs.

He curls away from her again, trying to roll to his feet. His arms won’t hold him when he tries to scrabble up.

“King Balon is dead,” she says. “If you are Prince Theon, you have to come home.”

“I can’t.”

"You have to. All the claimants are joining the kingsmoot. You’re the last son of Balon Greyjoy.”

“I’m nobody. I’m—” His voice fails him and he struggles to his knees.

She’s wearing some kind of skintight brown and green armor, and she stands before him on the balls of her feet, ready to move. She has some kind of netting slung over her back, like a bag, and water drips from it steadily onto the sand.

He throws himself at her feet. “Kill me.”

“What?”

“You can do it. You’re a warrior. You can kill me and leave me in the water. Far out, where I won’t get swept back onto the shore.”

She kicks him away and takes several steps back. “You’re no son of Balon Greyjoy,” she says.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” He kneels again, tilting his head all the way back to look at her and bare his throat. “Kill me. It would be a mercy.”

“I’m not here for mercy.”

“Please.”

“The sea has no mercy. It has no place for the faint of heart.” She surveys him, a look of disgust on her face. “What happened to you?”

“I’ve been murdered,” he says. “Please, kill me before I forget. Let me die while I’m still Theon, before I become—your dagger, give me your dagger, please. I had the strength to do it, while I have the strength to do it.”

She looks at him in something like wonder and horror. “What sort of unnatural creature are you?”

“Only what I have been made.”

“The surface did this to you.”

He hears himself gasping for breath and slumps forward, his head down.

“You’re needed,” she says after a long moment. “There’s no time for mercy. There are bigger things. War on the horizon. Fishermen prowling our borders. Get up.”

“No.”

“Are you a man, or a slug?” She looms over him. He can see her shadow, he can hear the fury in her voice.

He cowers. It is all he can do.

“You are no prince,” she says. “No man will ever fight and die for you.”

“No,” he agreed. “No, never. I’m nothing. I’m nothing at all. I should have died.”

"Get up.” She waits for a moment, and then kicks sand at him. “Get up!”

And Theon, curse him, is used to following orders. He lifts himself to his feet and stands, trembling and waiting.

“Look at me,” she says.

He raises his eyes to her. Her anger burns cold, just as Ramsay’s did. He wants to cringe away from it, but he fears her rage more.

“Who am I?” she asks.

“Ironborn. You’re Ironborn. My lady.” He bows his head.

She snorts. “I’m not a lady.”

“I’m sorry.” He knots his hands around the hem of his shirt and it chooses that moment to give up the ghost, splitting along his chest. “I’m sorry.”

She is quiet for several long moments, and then she says, “I’ll kill you.”

He looks up at her with frantic hope.

“I’ll give you back to the sea. I’ll help you.” She reaches out and grabs him by the collar. He feels the fabric tear further and scrunches his eyes shut, imagining the reveal of his pink and red skin, the scabs he can feel crusting with salt water. “But you’re going to help me first. Do you understand, Theon Greyjoy?”

A wave of dread rolls over him, sure as the tide crashing behind her. Water rolls toward his feet weakly. It doesn’t even come up to the sores where his toes used to be.

“Yes,” he whispers. “Yes, I understand.” It won’t be so bad, being her creature, so long as she’s not Ramsay.

“You’re going to help me find Nagga’s fire,” she said. “And bring it back to the Grey King’s Hall. And dismiss all of those pretenders who would go to war with the surface. If we succeed, I’ll give you back to the sea. And if we fail, you’ll die. So either way, you’ll be happy.”

“Yes,” he mumbles. “Yes, I will, yes, my lady, thank you. Thank you.”

“Not my lady,” she says. “Call me… call me Esgred.”

"Yes, Esgred, thank you."

She crosses her arms and lifts her chin. "You know the surface. You'll guide me, and we'll finish this."


	2. Slept On, Stepped On, Left for Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esgred outlines the mythos of Nagga's fire and their next steps. Theon explains "no shirt, no shoes, no service" as well as "no axe or dirk around schoolchildren." Dadvos and Gendry outfit Theon for a museum trip. This chapter is not an advertisement for Flowbee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, when I posted this I realized that my average is 1 fic chapter per year, so here's to 2019 guys. I thought, "I need to write something," and fortunately having the Aquaman movie means this story comes prepped with an outline, but writing this chapter turned up some surprises in the plot I didn't expect. Like how Robb's going to show up. And how exactly Asha's going to find Nagga's fire. So if you're here for Throbb or for plot--it's coming, I swear.

Theon is so, so tired, but he cannot allow Esgred into the Seaworth-Baratheon house. His mother never explicitly said what she expected to happen if any Ironborn was to discover her, but that would be the failure that killed him. Theon has fucked up so many times in his life, but he’s managed to control the damage so far—it’s never struck anyone other than himself.

He won’t bring an Ironborn warrior into his childhood home.

But he will bring her into the driveway, where they can shelter behind the garage.

“So where is Nagga’s fire?” he asks.

Esgred stares at him. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything,” he says, “but I thought you came here because you knew.”

“No, you don’t know—do you know who Nagga is?”

“The sea dragon,” he says. “Who devoured krakens and leviathans, and drowned islands in her rage, until the Grey King slayed her.” As he says the words, it’s as though he can hear his mother’s voice overlaid on his. He tries to break some of the fairytale rhythm of his tone.

“So you do know something,” Esgred says.

“Isn’t it a child’s story?” he asks.

He remembers precious little of his childhood, but Alannys took Marya’s children and rocked them on her knee and cooed the stories to them. And when Shireen demanded they play with her—never queens and knights, but instead adventurers ranging Beyond-the-Wall and into the deserts of Dorne and to pirate coves on Stepstones—Theon grinned to tell her about the High King of the Iron Kingdom. No matter how many boys in their house, only he could have told her those stories.

Esgred gives him a hard look—which isn’t saying much, considering how hard and sharp her face is to begin with. “Is the kraken a children’s story? Is the Drowned God?”

Theon prayed for any number of gods to kill him, and none living or dead ever answered him.

“I don’t know anything,” he repeats.

“The Grey King built his hall of Nagga’s bones,” Esgred said. “And he warmed it with her living fire. He made his throne of her jaw and his crown of her teeth. And when he died, they say, the Storm God extinguished her fire and washed away throne and crown.” She makes a strange gesture that ends with her clasping the dirk around her throat.

“What’s that?” Theon asks.

She gives him an incredulous look. “A dirk.”

“No, I know that.” He’s intimately familiar with any number of blades now. “What was— ” He waves his hand to mimic the gesture she made.

“That the Storm God may never snare me and cast me down,” she says.

Well. Maybe that’s the mistake he made.

“So if the Storm God—” He makes the gesture again. Esgred grabs him by the wrist and he startles, but she opens his remaining fingers from his palm and guides him through the gesture. He can’t do it the same as she does—he’s missing too many digits—but apparently she takes this very seriously. “—put out the fire, how do you hope to find it?”

“Think about it. How does a man warm a hall with the living fire of a dead creature?”

He shrugs at her. “What is dead may never die?”

She snorts. “It’s an artifact, like the crown and throne. Nagga’s bones are stone and are found on Nagga’s hill, but the fire and the crown and throne were washed away into the sea.”

He blinks at her. “So how am I to help you find something in sea?”

“No, we’d have found it already. I’ve a man who claims to have found the crown, but he’s taken it and run. I’m going after him. Or I would be, if you hadn’t leapt in the water. You’re lucky I’m the one who got you.”

It’s not quite something Ramsay would have said, but the words spark a shock into Theon’s skull and he blinks.

Esgred doesn’t seem to notice. “Euron’s men would have torn you apart. And no one knows what the Fishermen would do with Balon Greyjoy’s son. They’ve been sniffing around, sure as you have.” She tilts her head from side to side and cracks her neck. She’s been out of the water for long enough that her gills have sealed and salt is drying in white streaks along her throat.

“Why do you need me?” he asks. He doesn’t know how long he was swimming—it felt like hours, but pain always makes time stretch. If she was just the first one who caught him, she must be a fast swimmer. Interceding—stopping Euron’s men from tearing him apart—only slows her down.

“You’re the son of Balon Greyjoy,” she says. “So long as you live, Euron can’t hold a true kingsmoot without you there to make your claim.”

“I don’t have a claim,” he says.

She slaps him. It’s so fast that he hears the crack across his face before he can react, and then he’s turning away from her and dropping to the sand.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, my lady, I won’t do it again.”

She’s quiet, but he doesn’t hear her moving in the sand either. She’s not gearing up to strike him again from behind. After a moment, there’s a soft powdery sound of sand landing on sand, and something prods him in the shoulder hard enough to push him over. He goes, arms up around his head, wrecked hands on the back of his skull. He closes his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I won’t hit you again.”

To his horror, he hears the thin laughter bubbling up out of his chest. Ramsay would strike him again for that alone. Esgred just lets him giggle like a child until he falls into silence.

Then she asks, “Can you get up?”

He feels himself panting. Instead of scrambling to his feet, he has to move slowly. Exertion and fear have done a number on him, and the water didn’t make his muscles any less tired. When he gets to his feet, finding his balance in the sand hurts less than it did on concrete. She said that the sea was not a place for mercy, but there’s that, at least.

She has the same narrowly assessing look that Ramsay did, sometimes, deciding whether he’d understood his lesson. Theon tries not to move much beyond what she asked, and cradles his ruined hands over his ribs.

“Is the one who did this to you still alive?” she asks.

He lowers his gaze.

“Was there more than one?”

“I don’t know, my lady.”

Another sucking silence.

“Opinions differ on whether I’m a lady,” she says. “And I don’t know the land. Nor do I care to. The man who took Nagga’s Teeth fled the sea and went to a place called Moat Cailin. Do you know it?”

Yes, he knows it. When he was in the fifth grade he went on a field trip to the ruins and found himself staring at the water. An alligator stared back at him.

“Yes,” he says. “It’s half submerged. A ruin. You should be able to swim up.”

“Now we’ve left the water, we won’t go back until we have to,” Esgred says. “Can we get there over land?”

“It’s in the middle of a marsh. I wouldn’t know how,” he says. “They had a ferry when I was a kid, but that would still be crossing over water.” Bran Stark was pretty tight with those kids from the Neck, and he managed to get around in a wheelchair.

“But not in the water,” she says. “Swampwater and seawater are different things entirely. They might be able to sense us moving around, but they won’t know where we are exactly so long as we aren’t submerged.”

He thinks. “Wait a minute, hang on. Is it any water at all? Like, do I have to avoid drinking water for the duration of this quest? Because that’s going to put a definite time limit on our trip.” Now that he thinks about it, he is kind of thirsty. It’s not unbearable yet, but he needs to distract himself from it if he can’t address it.

Esgred gives him a thoroughly unimpressed look. “Please drink water. Dying of dehydration is not on the agenda.”

He’s a little bit irritated that the Ironborn warrior knows the word “agenda” and he isn’t sure why. “Can I shower? Because it’s going to be tough to get anyone to sell us tickets to Moat Cailin if we go in looking like—” He gestures to Esgred, whose hair is drying in crunchy tufts from the seawater, and who is still fully dressed in skintight armor. And of course doing anything about his appearance is out of the question, but he really wants to take showers, just in general. Theon Greyjoy is not Reek, and Theon Greyjoy takes showers.

“Looking like what?” Esgred asks.

He absolutely doesn’t want to tell her that there’s anything she can’t do. She’s already popped him across the face once. “You look… very conspicuous,” he says after a moment.

“And that will stop us from getting into Moat Cailin,” she says.

“It might,” he says. “They take kids there.” He’s trying to remember if he had to go through a metal detector when he was a kid, the way now you have to go through metal detectors if you so much as walk into an aquarium. “And you are wearing armor and carrying a dirk.”

“And an axe,” she says.

He stares at her. “Where are you hiding an axe?”

“It’s in my bag. Swimming while carrying an axe slows you down.”

“You absolutely cannot take an axe into Moat Cailin,” he says.

“Because it will be conspicuous.”

“Because it will be threatening and they will call the police.”

Esgred looks completely stumped by this. “What kind of woman doesn’t have an axe?”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I… don’t know.”

“So what does inconspicuous look like?” she asks.

Theon is already thinking about it. “Well, not having an Ironborn showdown in a historic monument is one of the most important things.”

Esgred’s eyes go hard. “That’s up to him.”

“It really can’t be,” he says. “It’s really got to be up to you.” There are bigger problems to address before that. “So—you need to wipe off some of the salt, and—” He glances at her bare feet. “—they won’t let you in without shoes, so… I’m going to have to ask my dad for some money.”

くコ:彡

Davos says, “That was a quick turnaround.”

Theon left Esgred standing outside the garage, on the other side of the house from the dock and any windows. He really doesn’t need Alannys to look out a window and spot an armed Ironborn warrior just chilling on their property.

“Uh, yeah,” Theon says. “I’m going to—Moat Cailin, I think.”

Davos raises an eyebrow at him. “You sure you’re ready for that, son?”

Which was not what he’d been expecting Davos to say in response to a proposed museum visit. Theon knows he looks like hell, but he didn’t really expect Davos to point it out.

“I mean, if I don’t go now, I don’t think I ever will,” Theon says.

“You don’t want to start just…” He shrugs. “Having a meal at the shop? Go slow? Meet some people? See a therapist?”

He swallows. “I… really have to go now, I think. But I… don’t have a phone, and I don’t have money for a ticket.”

The expression on Davos’s face shifts, becoming more skeptical and more familiar. Theon used to beg him for gas money, used to promise all sorts of chores and shifts at the shop in exchange for taking… in exchange for money to go to the drive-in. And then Davos would bargain. That’s the canny look in his eyes. It takes Theon right back to being sixteen.

Almost.

“You swear you’re actually going to Moat Cailin?”

Theon extends his hands, feels the gaps between his fingers. “As far as I know, yes, I swear.”

“You’ve lied to me before, boy.”

Yes, Theon is a liar, and he used to be a damn good one.

“I’m too tired to lie,” he says. Omitting the truth about an Ironborn standing outside of their house is a different matter entirely.

“I’ll give you money,” Davos says, “but I want two things. Got it?”

Theon swallows and nods.

“I’m calling the mental health clinic, and you’re going to go for an introductory appointment with a therapist. Because I have rarely seen anyone more in need of one.”

He nods; if Esgred’s plan goes through he won’t make it to the appointment anyway. “Deal.”

Davos extends his short index finger. “And.”

Theon waits.

“Gendry’s driving you.”

He cringes.

“It’s him or me. Choose.”

If he has to explain to Davos about Esgred, he’s going to have to explain how she threw him out of the water, and the deal they made. Gendry is probably his best bet, actually.

“Will he even want to drive me?” It’s still early. Theon’s honestly not sure what day of the week it is.

Davos doesn’t break eye contact with Theon as he draws in a breath. “Gendry!”

There’s a muffled thud from upstairs. Then: “Yeah?”

“I need you to run an errand. Get ready and get your keys.”

Another moment of silence. “Okay.”

Okay. Theon wonders how long it’ll take for Esgred’s patience to wear thin outside, but there’s something else he wants.

“I need some clothes,” he says. “And—can you shave my head?” That’s a sentence he never thought he’d say in his life.

“We kept your clothes,” Davos says. “And of course I will.”

“Not my old clothes,” Theon says quickly. He’s not sure why, but he feels like he couldn’t stand to wear them. He was always tall and built like a swimmer, never bulky like Gendry, but now he knows he looks like a skeleton. His old clothes—nice clothes—belong to someone else.

Davos frowns at him. “I think Stannis is the only one whose clothes might fit? Go put some newspaper down in the bathroom. I’ll get the buzzer and something for you to wear.” He goes upstairs, apparently trusting that Theon will be there when he comes down.

When Gendry comes down, Theon is struggling to fit newspaper over the bathroom floor. Theon hears, “What the fuck?” and when he turns around he sees the recognition in Gendry’s face. _“Theon?”_

Gendry’s a big guy with black hair, and seeing him at the foot of the stairs makes Theon’s anxiety spike again. But Gendry is broad-shouldered and more muscular than Ramsay, and he’s wearing a Champion Rowers T-shirt (complete with two crossed oars) and cargo shorts. He needs to shave.

Theon stands up from his crouch. “Hey,” he says.

Gendry makes the room shake when he thunders across the kitchen and into the open bathroom. “What the hell, man, where have you been?” He whisks Theon into a hug before Theon knows what to do about it, so Theon just lets the hug surround him. “What happened to you? Arya’s been telling me—”

“I, uh.” Theon interrupts before he can say any more about the Starks. “It’s been… a rough year.” When Gendry lets him go, his skin hurts less than he expected it to.

“When did you get home?” Gendry asks. “I heard Dad—vos. Davos,” he corrects himself, “cooking earlier, but you could have woken me up for that. Have you seen your mom?”

At some point Theon gave up and resigned himself to having Davos Seaworth as his dad, but Gendry struggles a little bit, since officially Stannis is his uncle and guardian. Davos takes it in stride, going so far as to write “Love from Dadvos and Marya” on Theon’s nameday cards. Theon, Gendry, and Shireen all had their own mothers at one point or another, so Marya has only ever been Marya to them.

“Yeah, she came down here earlier,” he says. “She went to lay down.”

“What happened to your hair?” Gendry asks.

“We’re about to take care of that,” Davos announces, coming down the stairs with a stack of clothing. A pair of scissors and—

“Not the Flowbee,” Gendry says.

It had been a gag gift for when Stannis finally gave up on his thinning hair and shaved his head bald, but they had a house full of boys, plenty of whom were happy to shave their heads in the summer. Theon had never been one of them—cried, actually, when Dale and Allard dragged him onto the porch and threatened to hold him down to shave him so he’d match the rest of them. They were teasing, but Theon panicked—called them Rodrick and Maron. Gendry, the biggest of all of them already, wouldn’t stand for it, and laid into Dale and Allard with his fists, and Shireen cried too, and the other Seaworth boys dogpiled on him in defense of their brothers. Into all this chaos Davos strolled out, paying no apparent mind to the mess and whistling, and none of them realized what he was doing in the corner until he turned the hose on them. Stannis issued the groundings, after, and it was ruled Theon could keep his long hair if he wanted.

In a weird way, Theon’s relieved to see the Flowbee. Ramsay tested a number of blades on him, but never a Flowbee.

“Yes, the Flowbee.” Davos drops the clothes onto the kitchen table and brandishes the Flowbee, smirking. “Theon, you want to wash your hair before we do this? Just try not to take half an hour this time.”

“Uh.” He’s still aware of Esgred outside.

“What happened to your hands?” Gendry asks.

Which settles it. “Yeah, I’ll just. Wash my hair really quick. Get the salt out.”

“Theon,” Gendry says.

“So if you can just give me a minute, please,” Theon says.

Gendry raises his hands and steps backwards out of the bathroom.

“Throw your clothes in the garbage,” Davos instructs.

Theon closes the door, peels out of his threadbare clothes, and drops them in the trash can. Considering that the waistband of his pants tears down to the thigh when he takes them off, chucking them is the right call. He turns on the shower and blinks at the bathtub. The shower curtain had hidden the hinged door in the side of the tub, as well as the chair sitting in it.

How poorly is his mother doing?

He doesn’t bother moving the chair from the tub, just fits himself in the space closest to the showerhead and rinses his hair. There’s a bottle of his old shampoo there and when he opens the cap, the smell makes him gag. He closes it again and reaches for an unfamiliar bottle, which smells like lavender and is probably Shireen’s. It’ll do. He scrubs the salt out of his hair and then turns off the shower as soon as the suds are gone. His half-hour showers are a thing of the past.

He gets out and dries himself off perfunctorily, avoiding the mirrors. He becomes aware that he’s going to have to cover himself up if he doesn’t want Davos and Gendry seeing more of his injuries than they already have, so he wraps the towel under his armpits and opens the door a crack. “Clothes?”

Davos shoves clothes through the space in the door.

“Thank you.” He takes them and closes the door again.

Growing up, Theon always thought that Stannis was not only a professor (which was forgivable) but he also dressed like it (which was not). Now he’s grateful for the long khaki pants and the red plaid button-down shirt, because they cover him from neck to toe. He puts the sweater on as well, just for overkill. When he opens the door Davos says, “That’s much better. We’ll do this quickly.” And he does—clips through all of Theon’s hair with the scissors first and then cleans up with the Flowbee. At the end Theon doesn’t even have any stubble on his head.

He doesn’t ask how he looks.

“So we’re going to Moat Cailin?” Gendry asks.

“Yeah.” Theon would nod, but Davos is still applying the vacuum tube to his head.

Instead of commenting on what a weird errand that is, Gendry just grimaces and nods. “All right, man.”

Theon’s old shoes don’t fit him—his missing toes make walking rough—but Davos just says, “Not a problem,” and crams the toes of the shoes full of newspaper. “Is that gonna hurt too much? Take a few steps around.”

Theon paces the kitchen. It doesn’t feel great, but it hurts a lot less, and he no longer feels he’s hobbling like an old man. It could be the shoes; it could be the seawater. He’s not sure. “It doesn’t hurt,” he says, which is only a slight exaggeration. It doesn’t hurt any more than his teeth do, or his fingers, or the pressure of cloth on his wounds.

“No matter how it goes,” Davos says, “you can always come home.” And he reaches out and crowns Theon with a black skullcap.

Theon is aching with how long this has taken. On their way out of the house, he stoops and quickly grabs a pair of Marya’s flip-flops from the rows of shoes lined up against the wall. His heart is in his ears, but if Gendry notices he doesn’t say anything.

Theon drops the shoes into the footwell of the passenger seat. Gendry’s Jeep is a familiar abomination. As Gendry gets into the driver’s seat and buckles himself in, he says, “This is weird. I never drove you anywhere.”

“Yeah.” Theon always, always drove. He worked hard to save up for that car, that awful beater, but the car was a casualty of Ramsay too. For some reason instead of his own beater, the car that flashes into his mind is a cherry-red sports car. He never sat behind that steering wheel. “Listen, before we get on the road, I should tell you.”

Gendry reaches up and opens the garage with the button on his sun shade. “Okay.”

Which is when Esgred comes through the garage door brandishing a trident.

“What the fuck?” Gendry says.

Theon hadn’t bothered buckling himself in; he throws his door open and stumbles out. “What are you doing?”

“What the fuck?” Gendry says again. “What the—who is that?”

“That’s not an axe or a dirk, where were you hiding that?” Theon demands.

Esgred falls out of her aggressive stance, apparently satisfied that no one is under attack except from her. “It’s a trident,” she says. “It comes when I call.” She straightens and it just—vanishes from her hand. One blink it’s there and the next it’s gone.

“What the fuck?” Gendry gets out of the Jeep and comes around the side of the car.

Theon too is still trying to process the disappearing trident. “Uh, Esgred, this is my foster-brother Gendry. Gendry, this is Esgred, she’s an Ironborn warrior come to, uh, find a dead sea dragon’s living fire, and she needs my help.”

“A what?”


	3. They Gon' Have to Deal with Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gendry, Esgred, and Theon take a road trip through some of Theon's brand-new triggers on the way to Westerosi!Florida. Gendry is a good brother. No salt wives are taken on this educational journey. Theon chats up an alligator. The author plays fast and loose with Westerosi geography, fantasy currency, and a cliffhanger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning in this chapter for emetophobia--Theon stress-vomits and then has some hygiene-associated discomfort about it. And then Theon uses the word "bitch" to describe a car. Also this chapter is pretty consistent with the level of Theon angst and self-hatred. There is no vomiting in the second half of the chapter, so once you pass the little squid break, you're safe.

On the road to Moat Cailin, Gendry gives up on tense silence and starts talking.

“I’m just saying, this is not the reunion I was hoping for. We all kind of thought that you didn’t leave of your own choice, but sudden road trip with magical mermaid—”

“Ironborn,” Esgred corrects.

“—sorry, Ironborn—”

“The Ironborn are the descendants of the Grey King and mermaids. I am not a sea demon. I am a warrior.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Gendry agrees. He adjusts his hands on the steering wheel. It’s unclear whether he truly understands the distinction or is just trying to be polite—or not to antagonize a woman who has already threatened him with a magical fish fork.

Weirdly, when Gendry begins talking, knots begin uncurling in Theon’s gut. Growing up and sharing a room with the guy, Theon’s pretty sure he’s seen the full spectrum of Gendry moods. He’s never been subtle. It’s a relief to know where he stands with Gendry. The answer is, apparently, in dog shit. But at least Theon isn’t left hanging in uncertainty, or waiting for a blow to come.

“And to Moat Cailin of all places,” Gendry mumbles.

Theon lifts his head slightly, continuing to watch Gendry’s reflection in the passenger window. Davos had also been cryptic when Theon said he wanted to go to Moat Cailin. The only thing Theon can think of is that his mother might have said something about the place.

“What’s at Moat Cailin?” he asks.

“A captain of raiders,” Esgred answers. It’s not quite the corner he expected the response from, but she seems to be interpreting this very literally. Theon looks up in the rearview mirror in just enough time to see her curl her lip in the backseat. “A Kenning of Harlaw. It would be a Kenning.”

Gendry asks, “Harlaw? Like, Alannys Harlaw?”

Esgred’s sneer vanishes and her face goes solemn. Then she asks, “What do you know of Queen Alannys, landdweller?”

Gendry says, “Queen—?”

Theon interrupts, “Gendry was raised my brother. He knows of my mother.”

“How?” Esgred demands, her voice flat.

Theon glances at Gendry, who keeps his eyes resolutely on the road. Then he returns to staring out the window.

“You know my mother brought me here,” he says. “She told me that it was because the reavers had killed her children. My two brothers, my sister. She said that she wasn’t going to lose her youngest as well.”

There is a pause. “Prince Rodrik was killed in an assault on the Rivermen,” Esgred says. “Prince Maron was killed defending Pyke from the Storm God’s followers. Neither were killed by Ironborn reavers.”

Theon says nothing. He knows what his mother told him. Even when her mind is slipping, he trusts her more than Esgred.

“You were there for the siege of Pyke,” Esgred says. “What do you remember?”

“Pyke?” Gendry asks.

“The capitol,” Esgred says. “The seat of House Greyjoy, kings of the Ironborn.”

Gendry huffs a laugh. “So you’re a king,” he says, his tone teasing. “Well, pardon me, milord.”

Theon knows what’s going to happen barely a split second before it does. He feels the thickness in his throat and pushes the button for the window, but it can’t roll down fast enough. He leans forward and tries to vomit outside of the car.

“Whoa!” Gendry shouts.

Over his own retching, Theon hears him put on the hazard lights and slow the car. Theon still has his finger on the button for the window, and once it sinks low enough, he puts his head entirely out of the window. There’s vomit all down the outside of the car and—disgustingly—spilled onto the cloth interior of the passenger-side door. Dots spatter the door handle.

“You could have warned me,” Gendry says as he parks the car, hazard lights on.

Since they’ve come to a stop, Theon opens his door and turns in his seat, putting his head between his knees. He gags a few more times, but he’s had barely anything to eat since the fish chowder earlier, and most of what he produces is just bile.

“You okay?” Gendry asks, once Theon’s steadied himself and is panting.

The smell is rank. Theon swallows, trying to get his voice under control. “Do you have any water?” He doesn’t want to wipe his mouth—doesn’t want any of his own sick on him, and he’d better start scrubbing the inside of the door before it soaks in.

There’s a liquid sound from the backseat and Asha leans forward and hands him a dark green thermos with a Lizardlion-Ade thunderbolt on the side. “Is this potable?”

“It’s fine, it just rolled under the seat,” Gendry says. “Man, if you were getting sick, you could have said something. I would have pulled over.”

“Don’t call me that,” Theon says.

“‘Man’?” Gendry asks.

“No, the thing before. Don’t call me—” Thinking about it, he dry heaves again.

“Okay, okay. Gods, what the fuck happened to you?”

“I have had a very bad year,” Theon says. It is perhaps the understatement of his life.

“Yeah, I get that, are you detoxing or something?”

“He cannot be poisoned,” Esgred says helpfully.

Oh, but he can get pretty fucked up on alcohol. His tolerance is pretty good, he and Robb proved that with bottles of liquor in the back of Robb’s cherry-red bitchmobile in high school, but given enough time and booze Theon can get nice and out of his head.

He vomits again. There is a touch on either side of his head and for a moment he panics, cringing away. Gendry, who leaned across the front seat to hold his head, releases him and leans away.

“Theon.”

Theon takes a deep breath, draws a mouthful of stale-tasting water from the bottle, and swishes it around his mouth. He spits.

“Theon, what the fuck happened. Really. You fall asleep out in the snow and get frostbite, fine, you’re down fingers and toes, but those teeth—”

And that’s interesting—his teeth should be screaming at him right now. Experimentally he prods at the empty spaces in his gums, but there is no responding shriek from exposed nerve. Instead his gums are—as tough and painless as he can remember them being. Since before Ramsay.

Cool. A little seawater, a little rinsing his mouth out, and now he’s a dentist’s wet dream. He can get literally flayed, but he can’t get gingivitis.

“Theon, who did this?” Gendry asks. “We shouldn’t have come out here, you need to go to the hospital, you need to—”

“We’re going,” Esgred says.

“Lady, I don’t give a shit about your magical quest, look at him, I said the wrong thing and he started puking, he’s not—”

“We’re going,” Esgred says again.

“Yeah, mysterious women appearing from the sea with big fish forks are no basis for a mental health treatment plan—”

“Can you please stop,” Theon says. “For just. A minute. Please.”

They both fall silent. Theon’s back prickles with awareness of their eyes on him. Well, he did ask for this. He swishes some more water around his mouth, spits it out again, and then swallows against his raw throat. Then he opens the car door wider and begins pouring water down the inside of the passenger door.

“What are you doing?” Gendry asks.

“I fucked it up, I’m fixing—”

“It’s a door—Theon, it’s just a door!”

“I’m taking care of it—”

Gendry asks, “Have you always been this stupid?”

Theon’s hand slips and water sloshes down onto Stannis’s khakis.

Gendry is going on. “I can get the interior fixed. I can’t get a new brother. I don’t care about the door. Turn around, look me in the eye, and tell me what the hell is going on with you.”

Theon caps the Lizardlion-Ade bottle and sits with it balanced on his knee, just shaking. There are seven Seaworths Gendry could choose from if he wanted a new brother, and untold numbers more from Gendry’s bio-dad, but Theon and Gendry shared a room from the time that Stannis adopted his nephew until Theon moved in with Ramsay. And they were always in the car together, too—driving back and forth from the Starks’ house, Theon in the driver’s seat and Gendry slumped in the passenger seat pretending he was going to Arya’s softball game as a friend, there was nothing more significant about it, and Theon would park and get out of the car and there, saying, “You’re right on time! Come help me with the cooler!” was—

He brings his knees slowly back inside the vehicle and turns to look at Gendry. Gendry can look frightening without even trying—he had the brawn and the good heart where Theon had the sick sense of humor and the prissy wardrobe, so when Shireen was getting picked on at school it was always Gendry storming in there and finishing things, throwing his weight around. Theon needled and mocked and made people walk away from him saying what the fuck is wrong with you, but Gendry was always the knight in shining armor.

He doesn’t look frightening now. He’s all the way on the other side of the car, hip to the driver’s side door—probably because Theon fucking stinks, he just puked all over—and his expression is pleading.

“I need to go to Moat Cailin,” Theon says. He knows what Gendry will say if he tells him that he’s made some kind of suicide pact with Esgred (still sitting in the back, looking irritated), so he can’t tell him that. “That’s it. I just need to go to Moat Cailin.”

“Theon.” Gendry holds up his hands. “You don’t want to go to Moat Cailin. Trust me. You need to regroup, see a doctor, and rest up at home. It’s been hell on everyone since you left.”

“I know,” Theon says. Shame burns in his throat—or maybe that’s acid. “But I need to go to Moat Cailin. I—I can’t go home, until I go to Moat Cailin.”

Gendry blinks at him several times. Theon can see the oars paddling in his head, water churning. “Fine,” Gendry says. “Hang on.” He takes out his phone.

“Who are you texting?” Theon asks, afraid again.

“Arya. We had plans, but now I’m going on a magical quest.”

“Do not tell anyone about this,” Esgred says, reminding everyone that she’s in the car.

“Oh trust me, this is not the kind of conversation you have over text message.” Gendry taps at his phone screen with his thumb, then sighs and puts his phone in one of the many pockets of his cargo shorts. “Not even an option right now, Ms. Ironborn.” He looks up at Theon. “Should we stop at a gas station, get you some motion sickness stuff?”

Theon’s issues can’t be cured by a Dramamine. Instead of addressing that, he points his thumb to Esgred, still in full armor but now equipped with Marya’s flip-flops, in the back. “Can’t take Ms. Ironborn into a gas station.”

“I have acquired camouflage,” Esgred says. “There is a small article of clothing here that should cover my armor.”

Gendry glances in the rearview and says, “Put that down, that’s my girlfriend’s favorite hoodie, if you stretch it out she’ll kill me.”

くコ:彡

They park in the lot outside of Moat Cailin’s visitor’s center, but there’s still a ferry ride to get to the site proper. Theon takes out the bills that Davos gave him, and just as quickly Gendry nudges his hand aside and passes a debit card over to the attendant. Behind them, Esgred stands as though bored, the upper half of her armor covered by an oversize t-shirt that says Caught Necking. Gendry let Theon pay for that with cash.

“Since when do you have money?” Theon finds himself asking. Tickets are eleven moons each—something about restoration and preservation—but Gendry forks over a full dragon and three moons with hardly a batted eye. Theon saved up for his car working at Davos’s restaurant, but the money was never that good, that he could blow over a dragon on a whim for himself and two other people.

“I got a job?” Gendry says, like it should be obvious. “I’m assisting a vet? I have been for the last two and a half years, so this shouldn’t be a surprise to you.”

Yeah, but when Ramsay arrived Theon’s brain kind of turned into a sieve. The things he remembers are hit and miss. And missing Gendry’s career is exactly the sort of self-absorbed shit Theon would have pulled, back in the day.

“What vet? Where’s there a vet at home?”

“Large animal medicine,” Gendry says. “He goes out to farms, up by the wall. Dude, I have delivered cow placenta, and you thought puking in my car was gonna be a dealbreaker.” He puts his card back in his wallet and puts that in the ridiculous cargo shorts. As they stride toward the ferry, Gendry completely ignores a sign warning them of mosquitoes and advising passengers to apply bug spray to exposed skin.

“Your fucking shorts,” Theon mutters.

Gendry stills and Theon has a moment to fear that he has fucked up a lot worse than he expected to, but instead Gendry turns around with a massive smile on his face. “There you are,” he says. He steps aside to allow Esgred to board the ferry first. “Ma’am?”

Esgred seems to interpret this as an invitation to clear the ferry of possible enemies, because she shakes the captain’s hand and walks around the ferry looking for other passengers, a grim look on her face. Then she returns to Theon and Gendry. “It appears safe to board.”

“Nervous around ships?” the captain asks.

“This one gets motion sick,” Gendry says, pointing at Theon.

Theon elbows him. Gendry elbows him back. It hurts a lot more than Theon is used to, because Theon no longer has even a little bit of fat on his body to cushion the blow. But it’s done in affection, so he lowers his arm and lets blood rush back to the area with the promise of new bruising.

“Ah. We don’t go too fast on the water here—lots of roots you need to be careful of, and the lizard-lions can sometimes be close to the surface, so we want to go easy on the propeller,” the captain says. “If you’re feeling unwell, you might want to come up to the front, get the air in your face and see where we’re going.”

“Oh, thanks,” Theon says. “I’ll be all right, though.”

“All right,” the captain says. “My daughter leads the tour. Welcome to the _Myraham_ , gentlemen, lady.”

Mercifully Esgred doesn’t quibble about the term “lady,” instead choosing to take her seat on the ferry. Theon sits on the bench adjacent to hers, not quite wanting to be close.

There’s a large aquarium in the center of the boat, and various things float in the green water. After a moment the tour guide appears, leaning against the aquarium. Gendry makes polite conversation, while Esgred and Theon sit as her spiel about conservation and the local ecosystem washes over them.

“When did you lose your mother?” Esgred asks quietly.

Theon looks over at her, surprised, and then prepares himself to lie. “Near as soon as we arrived,” he says. “I was—young. Nine or ten, I think.” That was when she had begun slipping. He doesn’t want the Ironborn warrior to know anything about his mother; he wants her to be a ghost to all of Pyke, so no one will ever come into their house and drag her back.

She used to have terrors about that, when they were new in Davos and Marya’s house. She used to wake Theon up and drag him into the bathroom, lock the doors and sit fully dressed in the empty bathtub, huddled together, until one of them fell asleep.

“She was wounded,” Esgred says.

“How do you know that?”

“Alannys Harlaw may not have been descended from the Grey King, but the Harlaws are still a prominent line of reavers. We all smelled her blood in the water.” Esgred puts her elbows on her knees. “But you say she didn’t die immediately.”

No, because he was eight when his mother dragged him out of the sea. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t her injuries.” Though now that he thinks of it, how can he be sure that she didn’t suffer a blow to the head, in fleeing during the siege of Pyke? He remembers her coming into his room, silver hair swirling, and the tremors of disturbance in the castle outside. Smelling blood. Not his mother's. Lots of people's.

“What do you remember of the sea?” Esgred asks. Her voice is quiet, almost soft.

“Nothing,” he lies.

The tour guide says, “Humans drained most swamps and wetlands to create more room for agriculture and to prevent disease from swamp animals such as mosquitoes. However, Moat Cailin is protected as a Westerosi Heritage Site. Most of our funding comes from the Reed Institution, meaning that Moat Cailin is one of the few Heritage Sites remaining on the continent still protected by its indigenous people. If you look over to your left, you’ll be able to see a real crannog. It’s no longer in use, but this artificial island was restored so that visitors can see how the original crannogmen lived.”

Theon ignores her. He does not remember having to sit through a one-on-one ferry ride tour in elementary school.

Apparently this doesn’t bother the tour guide, because she continues her spiel right up until the moment they dock outside of the ruins. As the captain comes out to tie the boat to the dock, Theon looks over and thinks perhaps he misremembered how much of the ruins remained ruin, because there’s a large, shiny geometric building that looks mostly made of glass at the other end of the dock.

“So now you can enter the Moat Cailin Historical Site, and one of our other tour guides will give you more history about the Moat and its history as a medieval fort,” the tour guide continues chipperly. “You’ll be able to see the ruins from the full-length window.”

Well that definitely wasn’t there when Theon was ten.

Gendry thanks the tour guide for her time, and Esgred shakes hands with the captain again. Theon smiles without showing his teeth and ducks his head every time they try to make eye contact with him. He’s more focused on keeping his footing on the floating dock. His toes hurt less, but he’s definitely clumsier than he used to be, and he wants to kick himself for it, except that would definitely overbalance him and then he’d fall into the swamp, be mauled by a lizardlion, and die.

Speaking of which.

On the other side of the dock, he sees a slow black eye staring at him from a mass of what looks like algae. Instinctively he reaches out and grabs Gendry by the arm.

Gendry turns his head. “What?”

Theon points with his right hand, which is missing only the middle finger. The absence is less obvious when he balls his hands into a fist. Gendry follows his eyeline and murmurs, “Oh boy,” when he sees the lizardlion.

“See something, son?” the captain asks.

He lowers his hand immediately and stuffs them back in the pockets of Stannis’s professorial khakis.

The tour guide appears around his shoulder. “Yes, that’s a lizardlion there. That’s a smaller one, could be either male or female based on size. It’s likely that there are more in the area of a similar size. They tend to be shy of humans, but these ones are used to the _Myraham_ coming and going and know not to build their nests too close to the dock. Just please be cautious with the lizardlions, do not approach them, and definitely do not feed them.”

Theon does not break eye contact with the lizardlion. He slowly inclines his head. “Just passing through.”

The black eye blinks and then slowly sinks beneath the surface of the water. Theon has a curious sense that if it could speak, it would say, If you say so.

“There you go,” the tour guide says. “It’s very unlikely that any will come up to the dock while you’re on it, so feel free to walk on through.”

“Thank you so much for the tour,” Gendry says brightly. “Is it appropriate to tip here? Theon, give me the cash.”

As the tour guide and the captain start protesting, Theon hands over one of the ten-stag notes that Davos gave him. Gendry tucks it into the tour guide’s hand, gives her a winning smile, and turns away.

As they approach the heritage site, Theon murmurs, “Girlfriend, eh?” There was a time when he would have flirted with the tour guide, almost habitually and meaning absolutely nothing, just to pass the time. But now Gendry’s the handsome one.

“Fuck off,” Gendry replies politely.

Esgred asks, “Why did you speak to the lizardlion?”

Theon grimaces and wonders how best to explain to an Ironborn warrior that memes reading “Neck Man arrested for eating live fireworks” and the like have given him a healthy fear of the swamp and what it does to people. Sure, the Reeds were around at the Stark house sometimes, too. But Theon’s not ready to rule out the idea that lizardlions are a magnet for insanity.

“Wanted to be clear that there was no reason to hurt us,” he says instead. He’s seen videos of lizardlion attacks on _Animal Known World_. He’s survived Ramsay; he’s not about to get taken out by a really big reptile. Even if the tour guide said it was a smaller one.

Esgred raises an eyebrow, huffs through her nose, and looks away. Instead of the concession it would be if Theon averted his gaze from her, this feels like a dismissal. Her face is unimpressed. Well, she knows Theon's a coward. Nothing new there.

Gendry opens the door to the massive reflective building. “Do you know where you’re meeting your guy?”

“We’re hunting him, we haven’t planned a rendezvous,” Esgred replies.

A person strides toward them, saying, “Welcome to Moat Cailin Westerosi Heritage Site. If I could see your tickets, please?”

Theon reaches in his pocket and holds his ticket out with the comparatively better right hand. He looks up to make eye contact with the tour guide and the bottom drops out of his stomach.

So he’s gotten glasses in the last year, and he’s let his awful ginger stubble darken into something closer to a beard. But Theon is gonna see that red hair when he shuts his eyes for the rest of his life.

He comes to a halt, sheer astonishment on his face. _“Theon?”_

Yeah, he’s getting used to that reaction.

Theon opens his mouth, but there is absolutely nothing he can say to Robb.


	4. You'll Never Find It Wearin' a Life Vest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robb tries to reunite. Theon tries not to have a panic attack. Gendry has multiple close encounters with fantasy!alligators. Esgred is a woman on a mission. Robb and Theon hug several times and can't even enjoy it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings first--mention of the vomiting from last chapter, and Theon starts to go into a nice panic attack that Gendry tries to talk him down from--and then something else happens. Also, some dangerous stunts are performed at a height. Past!Alannys says some disturbing things to child!Theon. Present!Theon thinks some unpleasant things about himself.
> 
> Now that everyone's fully informed on that front--listen, the Aquaman movie is not subtle either. This chapter is a big old reminder that Theon and Asha are not human and have superpowers. And in my defense, I think this is the only Throbb fic with this particular encounter.

Esgred, unsurprisingly, is not at all interested in Robb’s drama, and instead walks straight through the turnstile. Apparently miraculously no metal detectors go off. Theon did insist that they leave the axe and dirk in the Jeep.

But Gendry knows that Theon is imploding—must have known he was going to implode, him and Davos both, what did they think he was going to do, go to Moat Cailin and fling himself on Robb’s mercy as though Robb would want to see him, as though Robb would want to see him again at work, as though Robb needs Theon to fuck up one more thing about his life—

Robb hugs him, suddenly and abruptly. Theon feels the air whoosh out of his lungs and he stands there on his toes, trying to hold his balance.

“Robb, easy, he’s not feeling well,” Gendry says.

The traitor speaks.

But Robb takes the advice to heart and suddenly is holding Theon out at arm’s length, his eyes big and blue and liquid. Like Theon deserves that hurt look. In a way he’d be happier if Robb punched him to the ground and then spat on his neck.

Yeah, ‘cause that sounds like Robb Stark.

“What happened? Where have you been?” Robb asks. “Gods, you’re so thin…”

Theon opens and closes his mouth slowly and feels himself starting to tremble.

Robb’s hands slide down Theon’s arms. Theon is grateful for Stannis’s sweater, thick and holding him in.

“Have you been sick? Oh my gods, have you been in the hospital?” He shakes his head hard. “I’m so glad to see you, you don’t even know.” And he hugs Theon again, gingerly resting his head on Theon’s shoulder.

Theon’s whole face sears with incoming waterworks. He scrunches up his eyes and nose and tries to hold it together. He literally puked on the car ride over thinking about Robb—tangled up with thinking about Ramsay, of course, but Ramsay liked to talk about Robb. Theon’s never going to be able to think of Robb again without thinking about Ramsay, because that’s just one more thing ruined for him. He can’t even stand here with Robb holding him and calm down because he’s so fucking broken now, and if Robb knew he would shove him away—

Except he wouldn’t, because Robb has always been too nice for his own good.

“I’m sorry,” Robb says and takes a step back. He’s standing a bit funny now, with a tilt to his shoulders like an abandoned marionette. “I’m just—wow, I’m so relieved to see you. I didn’t expect—Arya told me to expect visitors, but this big LARP group just walked in and I thought she was just in on some kind of college prank.” He shakes his head as though to clear it, like a dog wagging itself dry.

The tectonics in Theon’s skeleton will not stop. He finds he can’t get enough air and opens his mouth slightly to get more breath, but oxygen will not come to him. He can breathe underwater, but he can’t breathe the same air as Robb Stark—he’s not good enough to breathe the same air as Robb Stark—

“Did you say LARP group?” Gendry asks.

Robb blinks as though he’d forgotten that Gendry was there. “What? Sorry, yeah, all these guys in costume armor. We think they’re cosplaying. It’s weird, but it’s good for business, so.” He shrugs, but he’s looking at Theon again. His eyes are so big behind his glasses—and high school Theon would be ready to keel over, looking at Robb Stark in glasses, because he’s always been a pervert and a creep and Ramsay just flayed the mask off of him.

“Like, historical armor? Like decorative stuff, looks like fish scales?”

“Yeah, do you know them?” Robb blinks and then takes a step back. “Sorry, did you all come here with them? I shouldn’t have—”

“How many?” Gendry asks.

Robb blinks several times but answers. “Five or six? Is everything okay?”

“Probably,” Gendry says. “But Theon, I think we should go check on—” He looks at Theon. “Theon.”

Very slowly, Theon brings his hands out of his pockets so he can wrap his arms around his ribs. He doesn’t want Robb looking at his missing fingers, so he tucks his hands under his upper arms and slowly curls in on himself. His spine curves like a seahorse, his head lowering, and he stares down at his feet.

“Theon?” Robb says.

“Let’s step outside,” Gendry says, because he can see that Theon’s about to cause a scene in Robb’s place of work. “Robb, could you give us a sec?”

“I—yeah, of course. Do you need—there’s a med kit, I can get you ice—”

“We’re gonna take a breather,” Gendry says. “Everything’s fine. Hey, Theon, let’s go, okay?”

Theon can’t move, but Gendry puts his hands on Theon’s shoulders and steers him back through the glass door. The dock may be floating, but the building is braced on concrete. Gendry walks him all the way to the edge of the concrete and then releases him. The distance is safe enough that Theon can’t throw himself into the water to escape this very grave social situation.

Gendry knew. Gendry and Davos knew that Robb was working here—Gendry told Arya—and they all let Theon walk in like an idiot.

Theon curls up and lowers himself to the concrete, trying to hold on to himself. He puts his forehead on his knees.

“Okay, man, hey.” Gendry kneels in front of him. He’s big, but he doesn’t take up Theon’s whole field of vision—Theon’s aware of the building behind him, the water off to the side, the whining mosquitoes and the slow lazy sounds of saltwater. “Hey, are you with me? How many fingers am I holding up?”

Theon regains enough of himself to glare at Gendry over his knees.

He can see the moment Gendry remembers Theon’s missing fingers. “Fuck,” Gendry says. “Shit, sorry. Hey, you want to breathe with me for a minute? Just get some of this good old swamp gas in the lungs? Just—” He gives an exaggerated inhale; Theon can hear the wind whistling through his nose. “In through the nose, out through the mouth,” he says on the exhale. “Can you do that with me?”

Theon can’t do anything right—he can’t breathe right—but he doesn’t want to tell Gendry no. He can’t refuse, but he can’t do anything except let Gendry down.  
His first breath comes rattling in through his mouth.

“There you go,” Gendry says, like it’s not the complete opposite of what he asked Theon to do. “How about closing your mouth, buddy? In through your nose.”

Absurdly Theon thinks of his wisdom tooth extraction in high school, gasping back into awareness on a cot with Stannis applying gauze to his face. He feels himself, wall-eyed and trying to blink his way back.

“There you go,” Gendry says. “And out through the mouth.”

Theon obediently heaves a massive sigh.

“That’s great,” Gendry says. “Let’s do that a couple more times, can you do that with me?”

God, Gendry’s never been responsible. Never had to treat Theon like a child. But Theon breathes, because he can’t say no. As the oxygen makes it to his brain, some of the discoloration around the edge of his field of vision relaxes.

“Cool, cool cool cool,” Gendry says. “Now how about you tell me… four things you can see.”

Theon asks, “What?”

“Trust me,” Gendry says, which Theon did and Gendry promptly sprung Robb Stark on him. “Four things you can see. There are plenty of things to look at, we’re in a godsdamn swamp, come on man.”

“This is stupid,” Theon says.

“Me being stupid can be thing number one,” Gendry says brightly. “What’s number two?”

Theon looks to his left and replies without looking at Gendry, “A fucking lizardlion.”

Because indeed, a lizardlion is resting just off to the side. This one is higher up in the water than the other one was—it’s whole triangular ridged head is visible, and it’s watching Theon.

Gendry considers this and says, “Okay, so how about we back up?”

“Yep,” Theon agrees, and tries to stand but mostly ends up throwing himself across the concrete. He is not as steady as he needs to be. The humiliation stings him almost as bad as the smack to the elbow.

So of course, that’s when Robb shows up again.

He opens the door to the museum and says, “I brought ice, will that—?”

“Robb,” Gendry says, “we’re taking it easy here. Can you give us a minute?”

Robb pauses and says, “Yes, of course,” and closes the door again.

Oh, that hurts. Hurts worse than flopping like an idiot on the concrete. Theon grimaces hard—he’s spent years avoiding Robb, and now they’re literally at his job, he’s just being more blatant about it than ever. He’s a fucking mess, he should have jumped off the boat on the way in and let the lizardlions eat him—

There is a strange click and Gendry says, “Theon, get up. Right now. Slowly.”

Theon looks up, but Gendry isn’t looking at him. His head is turned to the side. Theon follows his line of sight and—

Yeah, that’s a lizardlion crawling up onto the concrete.

“Oh fuck,” Theon says out loud.

“Yep, get up. Right now,” Gendry says. “Right now, Theon, we’re going back inside.”

Theon’s brain actually weighs the pros and cons of being attacked by a lizardlion versus confronting Robb Stark again. He gets one hand under him and as he tries to push himself up his elbow fails. He scrabbles a bit.

The lizardlion rolls up onto the concrete and then beaches itself there, eye still fixed sideways on Theon. Well, a lizardlion is not a dog.

“Nice lion?” Theon offers.

The lizardlion opens its mouth. It’s like a lid popping open. Rows and rows of teeth are inside.

So this is how he goes. It’s gonna be more violent than he really hoped for, but also pretty difficult to interfere with.

So Gendry decides to interfere.

“Theon, I’m gonna pick you up,” Gendry says.

“No,” Theon says.

“It’s fine. I’m gonna pick you up, and we’re gonna go inside. You weigh like nothing, I can run with you.”

Theon knows for a fact that the tour guide talked about lizardlions and that Gendry listened to the whole damn thing. He wonders what’ll happen if he asks Gendry whether a lizardlion can outrun a human, because he gets the feeling that they can.

“And here we go,” Gendry says, and lunges for Theon.

Theon braces himself, and the lizardlion lunges at the same time, twisting toward Gendry.

“No!” Theon says. It comes out of someplace deep inside him—sure, he can get mauled by a lizardlion, but Gendry absolutely can’t, that can’t be the last mistake that Theon makes.

The lizardlion stills and slowly turns back to Theon, its body twisting so it can keep looking at him in profile.

Theon has a vague wish that he’d learned something from Beric Dondarrion, _The Crocodile Hunter_ , on _Animal Known World_. Is he supposed to wrestle it?

“Please don’t hurt us,” he mumbles.

And then he hears Robb, which is literally the only way this situation could be worse.

“No,” Robb says. “This is not happening. This is not happening.” And he comes striding toward them, pushes Gendry aside, and waves with his arms. “Go on. You’re not hungry, and they’re no threat to you, go home.” He makes big “shoo” gestures. “See you later, buddy.”

The lizardlion is very still for several moments, and then it turns and sloughs off the concrete and into the water again.

Gendry says, “Holy shit, Robb.”

“Oh, they’re scared of people,” Robb says. “It’s fine. They’re all over here. They’re like bunnies. Really big, sharp bunnies.”

“Yeah, that was not scared of me,” Gendry says. “Gods, Stark, do you have balls of iron or what?”

“Yes,” Robb says matter-of-factly, and then turns to Theon. He holds out a hand, offering Theon a lift up.

Theon takes a breath in through his nose, lets it out through his mouth, and then reaches up with his right hand. And he lays his ruined hand on Robb’s forearm.

Robb covers it with his other hand and pulls Theon to his feet, because Robb’s always been stupidly strong. “All right?” Robb asks.

The last few minutes were surreal enough that Theon is actually shocked into a new pattern.

“I’m so sorry,” he starts. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

Robb smiles. “Okay, maybe we should do this in the staff room?”

“Yeah, before I get eaten,” Gendry mutters.

くコ:彡

They’re in the staff room at the Heritage Site and Theon cannot stop apologizing.

“—didn’t want to show up here and freak out on you like this, this is not your problem, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—”

“Nope, you didn’t,” Robb agrees, and pushes Theon down onto a dilapidated couch. “Maybe you want to put your feet up?”

Gendry is standing doubled over with his head in the sink, but Robb is paying no attention to him, because it is pretty clear that Theon is the basketcase here. Gendry is having a perfectly normal response to a lizardlion attack, and Theon is pulling all of the attention away from him because that’s the kind of scumbag he is.

“No, I’m just—”

“In shock,” Robb says. “Totally in shock. So here.” He goes to the red bag on the table and produces from it a shiny silver astronaut blanket. “Check this out. Moat Cailin’s finest.” And he throws it over Theon.

Well at least now Robb doesn’t have to look at him.

“Gendry, can I get you anything?” Robb asks.

“Vodka?” Gendry asks from inside the sink.

“One of my coworkers makes their own moonshine. It’s under the sink with the cleaning stuff.”

“Oh yes, that sounds great.”

“Cool.” Robb turns away from Theon and goes into the cabinets, moving around Gendry like he isn’t six feet of pure obstacle. Once Robb retrieves shot glasses, Gendry obligingly drags himself across the countertop to clear room for Robb to retrieve the moonshine.

“Theon?” Robb asks. He’s holding up a shot glass.

Theon wants it so badly.

“No,” he says.

“Cool.” Robb puts the shot glass back and pours Gendry the other one.

Gendry straightens up to drink it, chokes, and then falls into a chair. “Whoa.”

“Yep, that about sums it up,” Robb agrees.

Gendry plunks his shot glass on the table. “So I need to call Arya. And maybe cry in the bathroom a little bit.”

“Out the door, on your left,” Robb says. “Anyone asks who you are, drop my name.”

Gendry gets up again and lumbers his way across the room. With his hand on the doorframe, he looks at Theon and raises his eyebrows at him.

Theon shakes his head and waves him away.

Gendry gives him an ironic thumbs-up and leaves the staff room. Leaves Theon alone in a small room with Robb and a pitcher full of moonshine.

Theon swallows.

“Hey, Theon?” Robb asks. His tone is polite and casual.

He takes another deep breath in through his nose and turns to look at Robb. Robb, for his part, is spinning the little handle on the lid to the pitcher and not looking at Theon.

“Can I see your hands?” Robb asks.

For like the sixth time today, Theon’s stomach cramps.

“No,” he says.

“Okay,” Robb says, like it’s no big deal.

God, Theon hates him.

Except he doesn’t, because Robb deserves better than that—deserves better than having to be in a room with Theon at all, in fact. Deserves nothing but Theon’s unending gratitude for literally saving him from a lizardlion, of all things, but also for being willing to share oxygen with him, after how Theon treated him—

“Hey, Theon?” Robb says again.

Theon has to swallow again. His throat still hurts a little from getting sick earlier. “Yeah?” he croaks.

“Was it Ramsay?”

Theon is not in control of his breathing; he feels himself starting to pant.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Robb says. He’s still not looking at Theon—and why should he?

Theon swallows and says in a small voice, “No.”

Robb looks at him then, surprise on his face, and Theon has to look away and stare down at the astronaut blanket covering him from chest to toe.

“No, it wasn’t just—it was my fault, when I started—I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t a choice, but you know how you put something off over and over again, and it just gets harder, and I knew you were going to be angry with me—or you should have been angry with me, because I was a piece of shit—and I just kept putting it off, and putting it off, because I didn’t want you to…” He trails off.

“Be mad?” Robb asks.

Theon closes his eyes and groans, “Be kind.”

“What?”

“Because I knew you’d do this, I knew you’d be so fucking nice to me about it, like it wasn’t my fault, but it was, okay, you’ve never listened, no matter what people told you—your mother told you flat out what a piece of garbage I am and you were just—you should have listened, okay?”

Because that was Robb—obstinate and affectionate, walking up to Theon on the playground when he was barely more than feral after years of living under water and absolutely terrified to slip up and mention it to anyone else—Alannys whispering, _You can’t ever tell anyone, because they will find you, and they will kill you. Do you know what that means? Outside of this house, we never talk about it. They will come here and they will take us and they will kill us both._

And Theon hadn’t wanted to be Robb’s friend—hadn’t wanted anyone else to so much as look at him—but Robb was Robb, and kept sitting next to Theon at the lunch table and offering to trade half of his peanut butter and jelly for Theon’s tuna fish sandwich, and pulling out packs of yogurt-covered raisins and saying _I bet I can catch more of these in my mouth than you can_ , and following Theon around on the playground. They were going to be friends. Robb basically hunted Theon down, caught him, and brought him home.

And Catelyn Stark might not have been able to smell the saltwater on him, but she put her hand to her pearls the first time that she looked down at Theon and his Seaworth restaurant t-shirt, and Theon felt.

He didn’t know what he felt, then.

But Robb laughed at his jokes, no matter how concerned the teachers were with Theon’s sense of humor, no matter how many conferences they called in Alannys (and Davos) for to talk about Theon’s morbidity, and then, as he got older, his _inappropriate language_. Robb laughed and said _You’re so bad_ and _You’re the worst_ and it sounded like _You’re the best, Theon_.

“I’m sorry,” Theon says. “I’m sorry.” He starts to clutch at the edge of the astronaut blanket and then he takes his hands off it, because he doesn’t want Robb to look at his hands.

“Hey, Theon?”

Theon doesn’t look at him, he can’t keep doing this, his body has held him through this whole encounter, but he’s starting to shiver under the astronaut blanket and he wants to not be here, he wants to be nowhere at all, he wants to be underwater with silence pressing in on his ears—

“It’s okay.”

And Theon loses it.

“It’s not! It’s not okay!” he almost screams, and he twists away and drags the blanket up over his head. He curls up there like he’s eight years old again, that’s what Robb Stark does to him. His whole body hurts.

“Okay, okay,” Robb is saying quickly. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

“Don’t apologize to me!”

The staff room door opens and Theon braces himself to have to listen to Robb explain to a co-worker that this screaming psycho on their couch is his fucked-up high school best friend.

Instead Gendry says, “Uh, guys? I know you’re—we’ve got a bit of a situation.”

Robb’s voice goes from placating and delicate to wary. “What kind of situation.”

“Well,” Gendry says. “They’re not LARPers.”

くコ:彡

The Moat Cailin Westerosi Heritage Site is partially this big glass building, certainly, but the building is just in front of the ruins of the castle, and a long catwalk stretches out to one of the castle towers so that visitors can take a walk in the bracing sea air and imagine what it would be like to be medieval denizens of the fort.

As Gendry sprints up the stairs, Robb follows him at his heels, and Theon claws himself up, stumbling and gripping onto the handrail. Because it is perfectly clear that, out on the catwalk, Esgred is in armed combat with at least six people also wearing the scale armor of the Ironborn.

She’s slinging around that massive trident—which she absolutely did not bring into the museum with her, because it looks metal and is longer than she is tall and they would have noticed it when she passed through the metal detectors. She keeps moving, keeps all her assailants in front of her, but to do that she keeps edging dangerously close to the railing on the catwalk, and Theon can see it in his mind’s eye—one of her attackers bending her backwards over the railing and then pushing her. And then her falling—two? Three stories?—into the water below. And all the remaining stone, just under the surface.

If Esgred knows the danger, she certainly doesn’t show it. She grins as she fights—a snarl that looks like a smile, every tooth bared.

“Right,” Gendry says, and yanks a fire extinguisher off the wall.

“No, don’t—!” Robb begins, but Gendry has already charged through the door out onto the catwalk. Too busy watching Esgred, the other attackers—who also have magical tridents, because of course they do—don’t notice him, until he slams the fire extinguisher into the back of one’s unhelmeted head.

Then they notice him.

Theon reaches the top of the stairs and, still hanging on to the handrail, sinks to the floor.

“Yeah, our security guard can’t take that,” Robb says aloud. “I gotta call the cops, hang on—” He reaches for his pocket.

Theon grabs him by the wrist. “No!” Then he realizes what he’s done and cringes, but doesn’t let go.

Robb looks down at him. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“Please don’t call the cops,” Theon says.

Robb stares at him. “What? I don’t care if this is some kind of— _holy fuck_.”

They watch a man fall from the catwalk, pushed by Esgred. Theon shudders, gripping Robb’s wrist in his left hand and the banister with his right, but he doesn’t look away.

“Theon. _Theon_.” Robb tries to shake Theon off, but Theon hangs on tight. Robb turns and crouches halfway, getting at Theon’s level. “Look, I can get you out of here, but Gendry just concussed a dude, if he didn’t kill him, I don’t know what’s happening, and we need the cops. Can you let go of me for a second, please?”

“They’re not human, and they will kill you,” Theon replies.

Robb’s jaw snaps shut and he gives Theon one clearly terrified look. “What?”

“They’re Ironborn, and they don’t care for humans, and they will kill anyone who runs in there,” Theon says. “You can’t go out there, and you can’t call the cops.”

“What—Theon, _Gendry’s out there_.”

Theon grimaces—like Robb thinks there’s any way he could have possibly missed that. “Fuckin’ help him,” he mutters, not sure if he’s speaking to the Drowned God or to Gendry’s Seven (his Smith) or to Esgred. “It’s not safe out there, and you shouldn’t get involved.”

“I don’t know what’s happening, but I can’t just stand aside, Theon, please,” Robb says.

Theon releases the banister so he can hold on to Robb’s arm with both hands. His mother is deathly afraid of Ironborn warriors, and there are six out there and Esgred, and presumably Esgred’s on Theon’s side. Theon can’t do anything for Gendry, but he can keep Robb here, keep him as safe as he can.

Glass breaks downstairs.

Robb, who has been giving Theon a pained and desperate stare, snaps his head up. He breaks Theon’s hold and runs to the other side of the stairwell to lean over the side.

“Holy fucking shit,” Robb says.

Theon throws himself across the stairs and wraps both arms around Robb’s knees, keeping him in place. But from this vantage point, he can see what’s happening on the ground level as well as on the catwalk.

The front doors to the Heritage Site have broken open.

Because the lizardlions are coming.

くコ:彡

It is not a graceful stampede. Northern lizardlions—not to be confused with the Dornish lizardlions of the south—generally move on land in two ways. They can propel themselves on their bellies, or they can lift up on all four limbs and walk. Some are capable of getting up on their back legs to do things like climb chain link fences or to lunge at prey, but that position isn’t sustainable for more than short bursts.

As people downstairs scream—because in addition to watching the fight on the catwalk, the few other occupants of the museum are unlucky enough to witness the oncoming congregation—the lizardlions walk over the broken glass of the doors they have presumably knocked down and advance toward the stairs.

Robb bodily lifts Theon and staggers away from the stairs. Theon stumbles but follows. Robb backs up toward the wall opposite the catwalk and drops abruptly, spine pressed flat, and drags Theon down with him. Theon, half in Robb’s lap and completely stunned, feels pressure on the back of his head and cringes, but that works fine, because Robb is trying to hold Theon’s head into his chest.

And the lizardlions keep walking.

They are not fast, but Theon can hear them coming up the stairs. They are trailing swampwater, and they are not made to walk up stairs, so there are thuds as they slip or trip over each other or climb on top of each other, but Theon has a good view—with his head turned to the side and his cheek pressed into Robb’s shirt—as the first lizardlions emerge onto the landing.

Robb whispers, over and over again, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit—”

It could be every lizardlion in the goddamn swamp, for all Theon knows. The first one that slinks entirely into view is at least as long as a grown man is tall, and wide as a couch. And more follow it—some longer, some shorter, some fatter—but massive lizardlions, all emerging at the top of the stairs and—

\--turning right, toward the catwalk.

“—holy shit, what the fuck—?” Robb gasps, clutching Theon’s head tighter.

The lizardlions keep walking, and Theon has an absurd memory of that class trip when he was ten—children crossing wooden bridges over the swamp two by two, having to wait for the people in front of you to move before you can go, kids distracted by dragonflies. The lizardlions turn right, _en masse_ , and walk toward the doors to the catwalk.

When the first one gets there, it stands up on its hind legs and throws all its weight on the door. Instead of breaking, the door swings open, and the lizardlion falls back down onto all fours and strides out onto the catwalk.

“Gendry,” Theon says, and then twists away from Robb. _“Gendry!”_

And Gendry hears him, because he turns to look behind him.

And then Gendry fucking bolts.

Which is the smart move, of course, but he can’t go back inside because of the oncoming wall of lizardlions. Instead he just about climbs over one of the Ironborn warriors—a feat of agility Theon never expected from someone Gendry’s size—and sprints down the catwalk toward one of the towers.

Robb half-straightens, as though Gendry’s flight could have pulled him to his feet. “That tower’s not stable, it’s never been stable—”

“That’s a lot of goddamn lizardlions,” Theon points out, very reasonably he thinks.

And not a single lizardlion turns toward Theon and Robb. They all move with a purpose, all of them heading toward where Esgred has become aware of the oncoming tide and is slowly trying to move the fight toward the tower, away from the threat.

And then the lizardlions get within range.

Theon watches, as the lizardlions nearest to the warriors—who are now getting the hell out of the way—still, large heads lifting and massive spined backs arching. They coil tight and still, and then they lunge.

They clear a lot of distance.

The jaws snap down and even from over here, Theon imagines he can hear the warrior’s leg break. The lizardlion turns its head and yanks the warrior completely off its feet and then, casually, drags the warrior over the edge of the catwalk.

“Theon. Theon, don’t look.” Robb reaches out and takes hold of him, trying to turn him away again, but Theon finds himself just revolving in place, unable to tear his eyes away. And the lizardlions just keep coming.

The catwalk is narrow—there’s barely room for three lizardlions across, but they walk, and they lunge, and they make terrifying bellowing sounds. Gendry has vanished around a stone wall, but there’s still a good distance between him and the lizardlions.

Esgred leaps up onto the railing. It’s not six feet tall, so the lizardlions can absolutely still get to her, but at least she’s not within immediate biting distance. One of the warriors does the same thing, jumping up beside her, and Esgred promptly shoves him over.

_“Fuck!”_ Robb says.

One of the other warriors leaps on the railing on the other side of the banister and jumps of his own accord, arms folding above his head into a swan dive. Robb is going crazy next to Theon, shaking him by the shoulder, but Theon feels pinned in place by the back of his head. He just keeps watching.

There are two more, and Esgred is up on the rail, and Gendry is out of sight. Theon’s fingers twist in Robb’s sleeves.

And Esgred stabs a man through the back with her trident and forces him down among the lizardlions.

The last remaining warrior seems to decide to take the odds with the rocks below then, because he throws himself off of the catwalk. Theon can see the grin flash across Esgred’s face, and because then she steps down onto the catwalk, among the lizardlions.

“No!” Theon gasps.

But Esgred turns her back to the building and bends down over the pinned man. Her arms stay braced on her trident, pinning the man down. After a moment she reaches down and grabs something. Then she straightens and jerks the trident up and out.

It comes away bloody.

Theon’s knees give out and he slumps against Robb. Robb gets his hands around Theon’s upper arms and they sink to the floor.

The lizardlions closest to the door—they appear to be holding it open with their big bodies—begin turning. They lower themselves to their bellies and, casually and without urgency, begin crawling toward Theon and Robb.

Robb says, “Theon, if they come past the stairs, we’re going over the banister.”

“What?” Theon hisses.

“It’ll hurt, but it’s not high enough to kill us,” he says. “Okay? You and me, all right? I’ll be right there with you.”

“No,” Theon says. “No, I can’t.”

“Only if they come past the stairs,” Robb says. “Come on—over here.”

“No, no, no.”

But Robb has lifted himself into a crouch and has most of Theon’s weight, which means that he’s able to lead him over to the banister surrounding the top floor. They crouch there, one of Robb’s arms creeping up to wrap around the top, as though he’s about to swing Theon out of there.

Footsteps—distinctly not lizardlion footsteps—come toward them.

Theon looks up.

Esgred is swaggering her way across the top floor, stepping between lizardlions as easily as if she were walking across a rolling deck of a ship. In her right hand she holds her bloody trident; in her left, a bag made out of netting swings freely.

Not a single lizardlion bothers her. They continue walking toward Robb and Theon and—when the nearest one is even with the stairs—come to a stop.

This lizardlion is not as large as some of the others, but it twists its head to look at them. Then, slowly, it turns its head and points its snout at them.

And then it slaps its entire head on the floor.

Theon was not prepared for most of today, but watching a lizardlion concuss itself never entered into even his weirdest nightmares about Ironborn.

The lizardlion raises its head, apparently unfazed, and turns toward the stairs. Now that it slides along on its belly, it appears to almost fall down the stairs, like children riding lunch trays all the way down. It slips out of sight, and the rest of the lizardlions follow suit—proceeding down the stairs once more.

Robb straightens and leans over the banister, no doubt to watch the lizardlions leave out the front doors they knocked down.

Theon stares at Esgred.

“Uh, can you command an army of lizardlions?”

Esgred, still wearing her _Caught Necking_ tourist t-shirt, snorts and drops the net bag on the floor before them. The trident—vanishes, somehow, between Theon’s blinks.

“No, stupid. But it looks like you can.”

Robb turns back from looking downstairs and stares down at Theon. After a moment, he groans and drops back to the ground, half-crouched over Theon. He pinches the bridge of his nose and moans, “We’re going to end up on the news.”


	5. Risk Your Neck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starks incoming! Theon talks to the cops. Robb has a prescription, and then a poorly-timed confession. Asha sniffs people and then makes a slip. Everyone gets a close-up of a really big fish.

They do, in fact, end up on the news.

Or rather, the lizardlions do, and so does Robb. By virtue of not fleeing the building in time—“I happened to be on the second floor, and it didn’t feel safe to jump,” he says—Robb ends up being Moat Cailin’s spokesperson for the Channel 7 News, and the Riverlands News, and the Northern News Network.

Theon stays out of the shot by virtue of Gendry physically standing in front of him and strongly implying to the reporters that Theon is terminally ill. Which of course he can pass for, since he’s obviously underweight even in Stannis’s clothes, and in the skullcap no one can see that his head is shaved, instead of just hairless. He doesn’t like knowing that people are looking at him and seeing him like this, but he doesn’t have any immediate options for getting out of his skin. So he wraps himself back up in the shock blanket from the staff room and stares out of the massive glass wall onto the tower. Apparently his blank stare passes for general unwellness.

He can’t avoid talking to the police, though.

“What’s your name?” asks Officer Slynt.

“Theon Seaworth,” he says. He’s entitled to use the name.

“And what’re you doing here at Moat Cailin, Mr. Seaworth?”

“Visiting,” he replies.

Officer Slynt makes a show of taking a note of it, and then makes a point of looking Theon over from head to toe. “In your state?”

Theon blinks once. “It’s the only state I have,” he replies.

Slynt makes another note.

“And what did you see?”

“An army of lizardlions,” he says. “And some LARPers.”

“An army?” Slynt asks, skeptically.

“Well, they didn’t have uniforms,” Theon says flatly. “But there were a lot of them, and they were marching.”

“Are you on any substances that may result in confusion or hallucinations, Mr. Seaworth?”

Theon can feel Gendry’s eyes burning a hole in the side of his head.

“No.”

“Thank you for your statement,” Officer Slynt says. “If we have any questions, we’ll call you.”

It feels like shoddy policework. Then again, Theon hasn’t been impressed by the police in this area since… ever. He doesn’t know under what name the Seaworths looked for him when he was in Ramsay’s basement, but Officer Slynt doesn’t bat an eyelash at anything beyond how bad he looks.

Which Theon has really had enough of, today.

As Slynt walks away, Robb clears his throat to warn Theon that he’s there. Theon turns around. Robb looks tired and he keeps adjusting his glasses. It’s not a habit that he ever used to have.

“I’ve called my dad,” he starts, and Theon feels as though someone’s squeezing his lungs. “He says he’s going to come pick us up—he thinks it’s a bad idea for us to drive in this state. And Arya insisted on coming, so she can drive Gendry’s car. But there’s enough room for all of us in the van, if your…” He looks around. “…friend still needs a ride.”

Esgred vanished the moment the police arrived and Theon has no idea where she is. All things considered, that’s probably for the better.

“I don’t know where she is,” he says truthfully. His voice comes out thin. He takes another deep breath. “I don’t—want to see your dad, if that’s all right.”

Robb grimaces and Theon’s stomach pitches in response. “Yeah, of course that’s fine.”

“Or your sister,” Theon manages.

“Theon,” Gendry says, “I’m not good to drive.”

He takes as deep a breath as he can manage with the band of panic around his ribs. “I know, I just—I don’t want to see anyone. I can’t see anyone.”

He hates the fuss he’s making—hates it even more when Gendry sighs through his nose. “We can call Stannis, maybe—he might be at the college already.”

Great, he can drag one more person out of their way. He feels himself shrinking away from his own skin, trying to vanish inside his body.

“Hey, Theon,” Robb says. “I’m gonna go get something from my desk, and then I think the police want us to clear out. We’ll worry about everything else after.”

The thing that Robb wants to get from the desk turns out to be a prescription bottle of Xanax and a reusable water bottle. Theon stares at the bottle uselessly when Robb hands it to him, just reflecting on Robert E. Stark on the label.

“When’d you get this?”

“It’s been a bad year,” Robb tries. “You don’t have to take one, but it helps.”

Theon considers that this bottle might be his only way out and takes the pill.

 

くコ:彡

 

“So in my defense,” Arya says, “I had no idea about the lizardlions. No idea at all.”

That’s the first thing she says when the automatic door to the Starks’ minivan opens. It takes a few seconds for the machine to slide far enough open to let her out. In that time, Jon Snow gets out of the passenger seat with a furious set to his chin that makes Theon back the hell up behind Gendry.

He’s a coward, and that’s fine.

“Don’t you dare,” Robb says, moving forward to meet his brother. They connect at the shoulder and stay there. Robb inclines his head and whispers to Jon, and Jon’s eyes slide over Theon, no longer hard as iron but assessing.

Theon takes one step closer behind Gendry and then gives up and slings his arms over Gendry’s shoulders and leans on him.

Arya jumps down and presses the button to close the minivan door. As it reverses, she says, “I mean, I really just meant Theon. Hi, Theon. Long time no see.” Her tone is less cordial than blunt.

Theon is aware that her words should strike him, but they don’t. There is a great well of empty air in the space between where his feelings come up from deep down in him and where his ears and brain sit. Theon blinks once and says nothing.

Ned Stark gets out of the car and walks over to Robb, wordlessly separating his sons and nudging Jon slightly aside to get a better look at Robb. “Are you hurt?” Ned asks.

Robb slings his right arm around his brother’s shoulders, physically holding Jon in place, and says, “No. I need to take something. Do you have water?”

“I have—” Gendry begins, but Theon left remnants of vomit on that bottle with his mouth, and he elbows Gendry in the gut.

“I have water,” Ned confirms, because he was the soccer dad for years. He goes into the trunk of the van where there’s a flat of plastic water bottles. He yanks one out. Robb pulls out his prescription bottle of Xanax and shakes a pill out into his palm, and as he swallows it with the water, Ned runs a touch-check on his son—shoulders, biceps, forearms, holding Robb out at a slight distance to survey for hidden injuries.

Theon stares. It is almost motion for motion the same check Robb gave him when he walked into Moat Cailin.

“But after the ecoterrorists carrying weaponized pheromones, and the army of lizardlions, I think I should get a job as a TV-psychic,” Arya is saying. “You remember, like Jeyne’s grandma—not Sansa’s Jeyne, Robb’s—”

Robb gulps down water and lowers the bottle. Theon, who was absolutely not watching the motion of his Addam’s apple, averts his gaze. In a pleasant voice, Robb says, “Arya? Shut the fuck up, please.”

Under Theon’s arms, Gendry bristles.

“Language,” Ned says.

Arya just waves away the comment and pats Gendry on the chest. “Down, boy,” she says. “Who’s driving who?”

“Uh, Robb?” Jon says, speaking for the first time.

“I’m not driving anyone,” Robb says with great relief, and then he turns to see where Jon is looking. “Oh.”

Theon rotates Gendry in place to look.

Esgred is standing there, still holding her netting bags and mercifully without her trident. Her armor, visible only around her legs, could pass for avant-garde leggings. She surveys the assembled Starks with only mild interest, stopping on Jon.

“You have combat training,” she observes.

Jon’s brow furrows a fraction.

“Yeah, we don’t talk about that,” Gendry says cheerily, probably fuelled by moonshine. “Arya, this is Theon’s friend Esgred. She is from… Essos.”

Jon says, in a creaky voice, “So do you. Where did you serve?”

“The far side of the Summer Sea,” Esgred replies.

“Basilisk Isles?” Jon asks.

Theon can’t tell Jon that by ‘the far side’ Esgred means ‘the deep.’

“At times,” Esgred says.

“She’s Navy,” Gendry says loudly.

Jon nods once, slowly. “Beyond the Wall,” he says.

“Bay of Ice?” Esgred asks.

Jon’s expression doesn’t change. “Sometimes.”

“So!” Gendry says. “Who’s riding with who? Theon, you and your friend are with me, right?”

Robb turns and looks at Theon suddenly. It’s the same bereft and lost expression he got when Theon flat-out said he hadn’t been invited to whatever party Robb had been invited to, and he didn’t want to go anyway. The ‘How could anyone dare to separate us?’ The ‘kicked red kitten,’ Theon had called it.

Then Robb looks at his feet and away from Theon.

“I’ll drive you,” Jon says to Robb.

“Thanks,” Robb says quietly.

“Have you spoken to the police?” Ned asks. “Have they really determined it was an act of ecoterrorism?”

“I—uh, I don’t know,” Robb says. “We talked to them, but they haven’t made any announcements.”

“No, I got that off of DarkWings,” Arya says. “Look, you’re trending—hashtag-MoatCailinAttack, hashtag-TheLionsSendTheirRegards.” She shoves her phone under Robb’s nose, and when he looks uninterested and just tired, tucks her phone away. To Gendry she says, “I’ll drive your car?”

“This once,” Gendry says.

Arya punches the air.

Esgred leans down and sniffs the top of Arya’s head, which causes everyone to go still and awkward. She says calmly, “You are Gendry’s partner. You left your clothes in his car.”

“What?” Jon and Robb say at the same time.

“Excuse me?” says Ned.

“It’s a hoodie,” Gendry says quickly. “It’s just a hoodie.” Hesitantly, as though fearing he’s about to get tackled by a protective Stark man, he reaches into the backseat and pulls out the black hoodie. It is stamped with _Queen of the Dawn_ across the back.

“Oh, I was looking for that!” Arya says, and shrugs it on.

 

くコ:彡

 

As soon as they’re in the car, Esgred starts shaking out the netting bag. Theon stares at her, certain that there’s something he’s forgetting but unable to get there. It must not be important.

“You should put on your seatbelt,” he murmurs.

Esgred looks up at him, squints, and then reaches back with her left hand to yank the seatbelt down into place. Then she resumes her shaking.

The itch in his brain satisfied, Theon relaxes back against the seat and watches as a piece of ivory slowly untangles itself from the net. Water drips onto the cloth interior, but there’s really not any more damage that can be done to this vehicle. Theon already barfed on it today, so anything Esgred does just pales in comparison.

After all, she got the blood off somehow.

The ivory thunks down onto the seat. It’s a crown, round enough to fit on a human head and almost the height of one. Two great spears jut up from it, one in the front and one in the back. The crown is also lined in the front with shorter, sharper pieces of ivory. Theon can almost see how these little spikes would jut out over the wearer’s forehead.

Esgred reaches out and picks it up. There are some slashes on her hands, but none of them are bleeding. Theon cannot stop staring at them, so it takes her saying, “Look at me,” to make him jerk his gaze up.

She’s giving him the look again, that unimpressed look that—he knows—should make him want to curl up in his seat of the car apologetically. At the same time, he can’t quite summon the fear—and he knows that being insolent will net him a worse punishment, but he doesn’t care, somehow.

It is refreshing.

Esgred inclines her head, looking up at Theon from under her eyelashes. He realizes what she wants a moment later and inclines his head in the same way. She reaches out and places the crown on his head.

A vague feeling of wrongness rolls down Theon’s spine.

“No,” he says, and pushes the crown off his head and back into her hands.

Gendry twists around in the passenger seat and says, “What is that?” Theon glances up to see Arya’s gray eyes watching him in the rearview mirror.

“Nagga’s Teeth,” Esgred replies. “An artifact thought lost, stolen from its home.”

“Nice shirt,” Arya says to Esgred. “Is that what you do? You left the service and now you run around like Duskendale Jones, recovering artifacts? ‘It should be in a museum’?”

Esgred frowns. “Why would it belong to a museum instead of the people who made it?”

“It’s a movie series,” Theon says. At Arya’s narrow-eyed look, he adds, “A Westerosi series.”

“A movie,” Esgred repeats.

“Where have you been, Theon?” Arya doesn’t ask it with the wide-eyed concern that Robb or the rest of Theon’s family did; it’s with the exasperation he deserves. “It’s been over a year. Did you go to Essos?”

He looks up at her and the idea of telling her he never left the North is so weirdly appealing that he begins laughing uncontrollably. No sound comes out when he does it, either—he can barely manage hitching, panting breaths, and his eyes leak hot tears as he does it. He slumps sideways in the carseat.

“He’s sick,” Gendry says.

“I’ll say he is.”

“No, he’s been sick, cut him some slack.”

“I think I’ve cut him plenty of slack,” Arya says. “I know he’s your brother, but I have my own brother to be worried about. Did you give Robb an explanation at least? Theon, stop laughing, you asshole.”

The scolding feels better—feels like old times, like Arya out with her soccer ball in the backyard at the Stark home, Robb playing goalie and her taking shots at him, and Theon out in the grass fake-commentating as loudly and quickly as he could manage without stuttering. Arya, exasperated, whirling around and saying, “Theon, would you shut up? You’re such an asshole!”

“Where are you taking us?” Esgred asks.

Arya, distracted, says, “Back to Gendry’s?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Esgred replies. “We must go to Dorne from here.”

This is news to Theon, so he joins in with the other three people in the car in staring at her, nonplussed.

“Dorne?” Gendry says. “You just got back, and now you’re going to Dorne?”

“Our time is precious,” Esgred says.

“You can’t go to Dorne,” Gendry says.

Arya stiffens her shoulders a bit. The acceleration rate of the car increases. “Did you tell Robb you’re going to Dorne?” Then: “What the fuck?”

Theon watches Gendry look at Arya, and then sees Arya’s eyes in the rearview again, staring not at him with accusation but out the rear window with utter confusion. Slowly, Theon turns his head.

They’re driving north from Moat Cailin, which means that they’re just about following the river from White Harbor to where it will end just east of Winterfell. This time of year, the river should not be as high as it is, as they look. In fact—Theon sits up straight to stare through the windshield—the water is lapping onto the road.

“What river is this?” Esgred demands. “Where does it lead?”

“It leads to Moat Cailin,” Gendry says. “Careful, Arya.”

Arya changes lanes to the wrong side of the road to avoid it. As she does, a bass rhythm starts up that at first Theon thinks he’s imagining, until it resolves into “Seven Nation Army.”

Arya says, “Take my phone.”

Gendry reaches across and pulls her phone out of her pocket. “It’s Robb.”

“I know it’s Robb, but Jon’s driving.”

Gendry opens the phone and says, “Robb, it’s Gendry.”

The volume on the phone is high; Theon can hear Robb in the backseat.

“Hi, Gendry, would you put Theon on, please?”

Gendry twists around and holds the phone out to Theon. There is no reason not to take it. He reaches out, very conscious of his mangled hands and missing digits, but Arya has her eyes on the road and oncoming traffic.

Theon puts the phone to his ear. “Robb,” he says.

“Theon,” Robb says. “The water. Do we need to be afraid of the water?”

Theon can’t answer that. He looks to Esgred for help.

She takes the phone. “What do you see?”

“The river’s boiling,” Robb says.

She frowns. “It’s hot?”

“No, it’s bubbling, it looks like it’s boiling, it’s spilling out of the riverbed—what’s happening?”

“Do you know if it’s freshwater or saltwater?”

“It’s a river, it’s freshwater, and it looks pretty angry.”

Theon looks past Esgred and out the window, seeing the waves suddenly full of angry little loops of white caps.

“Fishermen,” Esgred growls. “Bastards. Yes, get away from the river.”

“Arya, behind us!” Gendry says.

Arya’s voice is incredibly calm. “I see it.”

Theon twists around and sees a crest of water come up over the riverbank and spill onto the road behind the car.

“I’m calling Dad,” Robb says, and ends the call. The app icons appear on the screen and Esgred holds the phone away at arm’s length, perplexed.

“Gendry, conference call Dad and Jon,” Arya says, still not looking away.

Esgred hands the phone over to Gendry.

The water surges toward their car. Arya accelerates and—

A tide of dark water slides over the road ahead of them.

Arya swears at the top of her lungs. Gendry’s car is made for offroading, but Theon has no reason to believe it’ll be any more capable when hydroplaning. The car gives a distinct jerk and then leaps forward. It roars along. Theon puts his face to his window and looks down at the inch or two of water the wheels plough through.

Then the river sloshes toward them again from the right side of the car, and water rushes up from behind them and floods them on the left.

“Son of a fuck!” Arya shouts, as the wheels vanish inch by inch under the brown water. The car slows, trying its damnedest to get them through the foot of water.

“A third course!” Esgred says. “Open the window!”

“What?”

“Open the window!” Esgred insists, and when nothing happens, she punches through the glass.

“Fuck!” Gendry says, but with the water rising high behind them they seem to be in the river, rather than on the road.

Esgred ignores this, reaching her right hand out and taking hold of the rack on the roof. She hauls herself through the window with one hand, taking Nagga’s Teeth in her left.

“Lady, what are you doing?” Gendry shouts.

On the other end of the phone, either Jon or Ned says something indistinguishable over the roar of the water.

“Fighting!” Esgred yells. “Steer a third course!”

“To fucking where?” Arya yells. “What are you fighting?”

Esgred’s feet brace themselves on the car door and she steps up onto the roof.

Gendry’s phone begins ringing.

“Not now!” Gendry shouts at nothing. He checks his phone and wordlessly throws it at Theon.

Theon manages to catch it in his lap, but he hardly pays any attention, in light of the water building up in front of the car. He stares—a wall of water is approaching them from the front, a massive wall of water, impossibly high from this perspective—racing toward them.

He leans forward and puts his hand on Arya’s shoulder, and one on Gendry’s. Gendry looks back at him and shoves his hand off.

“Take her,” he says, pointing to Arya, who is gritting her teeth as the wall of water approaches. “Don’t worry about me, take her.”

The phone continues ringing.

And—thirty yards away—the water comes to a halt. It hangs there, a huge wall of clear dark water covering the road and stretching out across the space that used to be the river. It does not come to an end—the road and grass have completely vanished under the brown water. There are ripped up trees inside, their white bark luminous in the water, their red leaves spiraling.

“What the fuck,” Gendry murmurs.

Theon looks down and answers the phone.

“Theon?” Robb says.

“Robb.”

“Is that your car?”

Theon takes a deep breath and says, “I got her, Robb, she’s gonna be fine.”

“What the fuck do you mean I’m gonna be fine?” Arya snarls. “Are you okay?”

From the top of the car, they hear a scream.

“I have the best claim!” Esgred shouts at the wall of water. “I have the best claim! I am the heir of Balon’s body! What sort of unnatural creature are you?”

And deep inside the clear water, a dark shadow stirs.

“Are you okay?” Theon asks.

He hears Robb huff a breath on the other end of the phone. “It’s stopped. For now.”

Arya’s phone, in Gendry’s lap, echoes from a distance.

The shadow grows larger and larger. Theon watches in horror as something swimming in the water—far larger than any of the trees—moves toward the edge. Then, suddenly, his vision focuses as the shape comes into view.

It is a trout.

A massive trout, its body bending as it comes toward the edge of the wall of water that serves as a surface—a trout longer than the car, longer than the boat they rode earlier.

“Seven hells,” says Arya.

Theon tears his eyes away from the fish to Gendry, who looks sick with dread.

“Theon,” Robb says.

“Arya, come back here,” Theon murmurs.

“Shut the fuck up, Theon!”

“Arya,” Gendry says. “Listen. Go back.” He’s unbuckling his seat belt and reclining his seat all the way, making room for Theon to get into the passenger seat.

“I can hold you both,” Theon says, but he knows it’s a lie even as the words leave his mouth. There was a time, once, when he would have been able to hold Arya and Gendry both as the water broke around them—when the strength of his birth was still in him, and not something he had squandered. Now he’s brittle and broken, and Gendry is large and strong. Theon can hope—he can fold Arya into him, he can get her out of the water, he might even be able to throw her up onto the shore like Esgred did to him earlier, but he has no hope of holding on to Gendry if the water yanks him away from him as easily as it yanked the trees out of the ground.

“Theon,” Robb says.

The trout blows a bubble. It floats straight up and out of sight.

“I love you,” Robb says.

The water breaks.

Esgred screams and it is lost in the roar of the water. Theon lunges forward and gets both arms under Arya’s, Gendry yanks her seat back into a recline and Theon drags her into the backseat, Arya kicks and hits the steering wheel. The horn honks. Arya reaches out and grabs Gendry’s hand—

The water parts around Gendry’s car. It rushes around them on either side. The car sways with the force of it, but the water does not touch them. Theon, still holding an Arya who has gone limp against him, stares out the car window as though he is in a tunnel at an aquarium. The trout slides past the windshield, twists, and floats impossibly beside the driver’s side door.

Its whiskers twitch.

Then the water carries it away, past their car.

Once they realize that they have some kind of magical forcefield stopping them from getting whisked away in the flash flood, Arya lunges all the way into the trunk to watch the water go. Theon doesn’t resist, letting her shrug her way out of his arms and turning to look at Gendry.

Gendry is so white-faced that Theon fears he’s going to pass out or spontaneously bleed from the nose. Neither of them say anything as the water flows past them. Slowly the wave passes, the water visible through the windows on either side sinking in height, red leaves from the weirwood trees whipping past. Slowly the sky becomes visible again.

Gendry opens the passenger-side door and leans out all the way back. “The fuck did you do?” he demands of Esgred.

There is clunking on the roof of the car, and then Esgred’s feet reappear in the broken window. She slides her way back into the car as though this is the normal and accepted way to enter a vehicle, and holds Nagga’s Teeth to her head again as she drops onto the seat.

“Even the Fishermen bow before our quest,” she says, and smiles.

“Dad! Arya! Dad!”

Gendry takes the phone out of his lap and says, “Jon, we’re here, the water didn’t touch us. Are you okay?”

“We got carried, but we’re fine,” Jon says loudly. “Dad’s not responding. Dad!”

Arya turns white and scrabbles back up out of the trunk. She puts her hand down directly on Theon’s head to support herself as she climbs. “He was on the road with you. Did you lose sight of him?”

“We lost sight of everything, because there was an apocalyptic flood!” Jon says. There is a muffled voice from somewhere on the line.

“Is that Dad?” Arya asks.

“That’s Robb,” Jon says. “He’s opening Find My iPhone.”

There is a sound distinctly recognizable as Robb cursing, and then a thud.

“Oh gods,” Arya says. Her voice is low and breathless, and doesn’t require a response. “Oh gods, where’s Dad?” She climbs back into the driver’s seat and turns the key; the engine wheezes.

Theon takes a few deep breaths, feeling his heart kick in his chest. He turns to look at Esgred.

Esgred stares back at him. “Don’t,” she says.

Theon doesn’t blink. Then he throws his door open and leaps into the water.

 

くコ:彡

 

Only a few feet of water still lingers on the road, but it’s enough; Theon lays himself almost flat, closes his eyes, and breathes in. There is that first painful shock of cold water hitting his lungs, and then the pain eases and he feels safe to open his eyes. Everything in here is blurry and unclear from dirt and silt; the sun in the gray sky can barely penetrate the surface.

Robb could see their car, at the base of the wall of water; Robb could see him and was convinced he was about to die and so he said what he said, but Theon won’t hold him to it now, he understands what fear does to a person. Theon thinks Robb and swims for him, unsure how he knows. The idea of Robb is like a hook somewhere under Theon’s ribs, and if this is what Theon is going to spent the last of his strength on, it’ll be worth something, swimming to him.

The water flows around him. He can feel the pressure on his eyes, but it doesn’t matter; he stays low and surfaces when he finds rubber tires.

It is not Robb’s car. Two unknown people stare down at him from the car windows.

Theon waves at them, heedless of his hands, and ducks back under. He isn’t so low that he can swim under the car, but he goes around it, thinking of Robb.

He used to drive Robb to school in the mornings. Jon Snow, who got his license a full six months before Robb did, used to roll his eyes at Theon turning up in their driveway in the morning, but Robb was always throwing himself into the passenger seat with his duffel bag and his backpack and two servings of toast to hand.

“Put that in the back, it stinks,” Theon said of the duffel.

Robb, instead of opening the car door like a regular human being, stuffed the duffel into the backseat through the space between the driver and passenger seats.

Theon’s hand touches metal. He surfaces.

Robb stares at him, white-faced, through the passenger-side window. Theon gets his feet under him and stands up.

Jon’s hand appears out of nowhere and shoves Robb’s head aside so he can stare incredulously at Theon.

“Man, what?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DarkWings - Twitter  
> Duskendale Jones - Indiana Jones
> 
> Robb's middle initial is E for Eddard or Edwyle or something, I haven't decided. I think the author of Stannis Baratheon, Fantasy Football League Commissioner had "Wayne" as Ned's middle name, and a middle name for Theon, but I would have to comb the fic looking for it.
> 
> "kicked red kitten" is from Everything is Cupcakes and Nothing Hurts by janiedean.


	6. Now It's Time for the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theon goes for a swim. Jon and Esgred witness a couple of awkward conversations in a hospital hallway. Robb cashes in an iron coin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go here we go here we go!  
> Thank you so much for the lovely comments, I didn't think this very silly fic would warrant such a response, especially when it's so much darker than the Aquaman movie and it's really taken on a life of its own. This chapter is probably best described as "gathering the Fellowship," and we see a lot of diplomacy and negotiation--through Theon, who is still convinced Esgred's quest is something just sort of happening to him.

If Robb is at all surprised that Theon has just climbed out of a flash flood, he doesn’t show it; he reaches for the handle to the door and cracks it, then waits for Theon to back up so he can open the door. The water is below the level of Robb’s car now.

It’s still red, the car, but a burgundy now. Nothing like the racer red of his first car, the one he got at his sixteenth birthday party.

Theon hated that car. This one is all right—it seems to match Robb, somehow, with his glasses and his longish hair.

Jon, on the other hand, has gone extremely white behind the wheel. His pupils have constricted so far that his eyes look like silver coins—not the way that Arya’s went sharp when she stared down a wall of water, but in a way more fearful. He points at Theon through the open passenger door and then points back through the driver’s side window. “You were over there. Your car is over there.”

Theon stretches his neck to look back the way he came. Sure enough, in the distance he can see Gendry’s car. No sign of Esgred standing on the roof anymore, thank God; there’s a figure walking around to the trunk and pulling something out.

Robb says, “Theon.”

It is different than hearing it on the phone. Theon has to blink Robb’s voice away. He wonders if sheer adrenaline can wipe out a Xanax from his system; he doesn’t feel like he used to, but he doesn’t feel like the creature Ramsay made him either. He’s something less, somehow—stripped down and hard and cold, like he’s turned to ice and become a creature of the north at last.

“Where did you see him?” he asks.

“I,” Robb says.

Theon can’t hold his eyes; he looks at Jon, who also looks like he’s struggling with the day he’s having.

“Where was your dad?” Theon asks.

Jon takes a deep breath and his pupils expand and contract rapidly. He’s sweating. He points forward through the windshield at the road. “We were following him. Robb’s car got carried, but we lost sight of him when the water came up.”

“The wall,” Theon says, going cold inside. “How far were you from the wall?”

“Fifty yards?” Jon guesses.

Which means that if Ned Stark was ahead of all of them when he was driving, there’s a chance that he escaped the river. But there’s also a chance that he got caught up in the water, just like the weirwoods. Theon tries to remember if he could hear Ned Stark’s voice on the phone when Arya told Gendry to call her family. He thinks maybe, but his brain has gone foggy on the details. He blinks hard, but it doesn’t help.

“Okay,” Theon says.

Jon says, “You can’t mean to go back in the water. You’re not supposed to swim in floodwater, or boat, you’re supposed to let emergency services handle it, there could be roots and debris—”

“See you later, Jon,” Theon says.

Robb is staring at him with huge blue eyes, afraid and in pain and completely without anything to say that isn’t Theon’s name.

Theon thinks of that ‘I love you,’ shrugs, and dead-drops backwards into the water.

Swimming up the road actually gets him into deeper water. At one point he turns his head and finds himself along one of the weirwood trees, no longer held upright by the water like so much seaweed, but pulled so that its branches lie on the road and the roots almost float. Theon makes eye contact with what looks like a face on the trunk. He shivers and turns away.

The thing is, Theon knows Ned Stark.

Not nearly as well as he knew Robb, once upon a time—he never knew anyone the way he knew Robb, or the way Robb tried to know him—but Theon spent a good ten years orbiting the family. And while Catelyn Stark always had a healthy skepticism of him, and out and out told Robb not to hang around with him anymore when they were in high school, Ned Stark just watched and withheld judgment. Theon spent a good amount of time convinced that the sword was about to fall, that Ned Stark was going to tell him, “Okay, Theon, no more,” and Theon would never see Robb again. Mrs. Stark was like Robb and so Robb flung himself into the backseat of Theon’s car and complained about whatever they were disagreeing about that week, but Ned Stark hardly spoke at all, and so when he did his children all turned to listen. If Ned had told Robb he wasn’t allowed to see Theon anymore, Robb would have listened.

Theon never spoke of Ned Stark when he was at home, after the way Stannis’s face twisted when Theon mentioned him once.

But Ned just watched him and watched Robb, and at one point when Catelyn was getting vehement in her frustration—something about a family reunion that Robb and Arya had dropped on like lead balloons—about the things that her children did, the way they ran wild, the way they never listened to their mother about what was good for them—Ned said, “Cat,” and struck her silent with just her name. Catelyn seemed to remember that Theon was there, and Theon quietly excused himself to the backyard where Robb and Arya were playing rage-soccer, and he flung himself headlong into the goal.

Theon knows Ned Stark the way he knows the old stone walls of the Stark house, up on a hill and so big that of course they had five (six) children to fill it, and a dog for every one of them. Robb dragged Theon home the week he got Grey Wind and took him to roll around in the grass with a pack of dogs, and Ned Stark came out onto the porch and Theon—half under a husky and Jon Snow’s massive white dog with the red eyes—had frozen, again convinced he was about to be thrown out.

Ned Stark smiled, and picked up a bone from the porch, and threw it end over end across the yard, and half a dozen dogs went barking after it, and Ned stood there and smiled. Not like Theon smiled. With Ned, it was just for Ned, and he didn't need anyone to watch.

Theon finds he can’t remember what Ned was wearing when he got out of the van at Moat Cailin. But it doesn’t matter—he knows the smile, the one that has nothing to do with any human person, but is for something uncontrollable and indifferent about nature—so that’s what Theon swims for.

And if he calls out, “Mr. Stark?” as he swims?

Well. The only one close enough by to understand him is Esgred.

The water level gets lower and lower, and Theon is almost flat with his belly to the road, in danger of road rash, when he finally comes across a pair of legs.

Ned is lying with his head just out of the water, his temple to the concrete and blood in his hair, with his left arm stretched out in front of him as though he’d tried to swim for it. The gold of his wedding band shines wetly under the gray sky.

Theon pushes himself up out of the water by his hands and abandons being Theon the Ironborn in favor of being Theon the boy. He crawls up toward Ned’s shoulders, turns his head, and puts his hand under Ned Stark’s sharp nose.

He’s breathing.

Out in the distance Theon can see flashing lights and the bright orange of traffic cones.

He gets his hands under Ned’s shoulders and carefully floats him a little bit further out of the water; he’s afraid to move him too much further in case he drags him on the road, somehow, or hurts his already injured head.

Then Theon stands with his arms over his head, and waves, and screams for help.

 

くコ:彡

 

Emergency services seems pretty accepting of the idea that Theon may have suffered head trauma that causes him to be unable to remember what happened. He tells them “there was water,” as though anyone looking at him in Stannis’s soaking sweater and dress pants couldn’t guess that. He gives his name as Theon Seaworth and when they ask for a number to call, he finds he’s gone genuinely blank.

He can’t remember Davos’s phone number. It’s been that long since he called it.

“I was with my brother,” he manages. “My brother Gendry, he was driving a—” He describes Gendry’s car and the road they were on, and then he remembers that Davos has a restaurant out by Sea Dragon Point and Stannis has tenure at Wolfswood University, and both of those are easily identifiable. Someone ends up calling the English department and asking if Professor Baratheon is in, because his stepson is being taken to Barrowlands Hospital.

Emergency services asks Theon about Ned.

“He’s my friend’s father,” Theon manages, and tells them that Arya, Jon, and Ned were driving back from Moat Cailin to Winterfell and to Sea Dragon Point, and that Arya and Jon are back further on the highway. “Ned Stark?”

The woman looks down at Ned’s face under the oxygen mask. “That’s Ned Stark?” she asks, because everyone knows the Starks up here in the North.

Theon will admit she’s not wrong to be suspicious. Unconscious, with a head wound, Ned Stark doesn’t look very recognizable. His hair is plastered half to his face with river water and dried blood.

“His children Robb, Arya, and Jon are out on the road still,” Theon says, and then becomes very foggy and allows them to begin treating him for shock. They want to get him out of his wet clothes, but as soon as someone reaches to help him he panics and begins fighting, and eventually they have to sedate him. No needles or anything, just a mask very like Ned’s, and then the sudden spinning of the helicopter.

He comes to—his brain clearing—and he’s wearing a hospital gown and under a heated blanket in a bed behind a curtain. Gendry is in a chair just in front of the curtain, wearing blue scrub pants instead of his cargo shorts.

“Dad’s on his way—Davos, is on his way,” he says when he sees Theon’s awake. “And Stannis is here—”

Theon hears shouting from somewhere down the hall.

“—my sons, who are beneficiaries of my health insurance, and you didn’t see fit to notify me that they were receiving treatment?” Yep, that’s Stannis, taking refuge in policies and protocol as always. Someone responds to him in an inside voice and Stannis’s volume climbs: “If you mean to make accusations, you had better be clear on what exactly happened to my son. Before you draw any conclusions, you’d better be able to tell me what—happened—to—my son—!”

“I—his blood pressure,” Gendry says, and gets up. He brushes the curtain over his shoulder and says, “Uncle Stannis. Your blood pressure.” His footsteps are heavy as he goes.

Theon finds that his hands are tucked into his armpits, where they feel warm for maybe the first time in over a year. He lets his head loll back and he dozes, quite comfortable.

When he wakes up, someone is leaning over him.

He startles and twists away, falling off the bed entirely. A heart rate monitor stuck to his chest goes absolutely insane, beeping and whining. Theon is dimly aware that his ass is in the wind, thanks to the hospital gown, and tries to pull the blankets up as a shield as he creeps behind the machines.

Then his eyes focus and he realizes the figure is too lean to be Ramsay. Esgred says, “We need to go.”

“What?”

“Did you murder a greenlander?” she asks.

His entire body goes cold. “No,” he wheezes, his voice becoming a weak thread again. “No, I never. I’m not. I didn’t.” He can’t finish a sentence; he wants to draw the blankets up over himself.

Esgred throws a stack of green fabric on the bed in front of him. “Quickly,” she says.

He dresses. As he does, Esgred stands with her back to him, face peeking out through the curtain. He detaches himself from the heart monitor last, removing clips from the many sticky nodes taped to his chest and leaving the plastic stuck there to his raw skin. When the monitor flatlines Esgred turns to look at him and then says, “Let’s go.”

He follows because she gives the command. She walks briskly through the long hall, divided into little compartments by more curtains like his own. They head in a different direction than Gendry had gone, getting further away from where Stannis was shouting at somewhen when Theon heard him earlier. Esgred doesn’t turn around to see if he’s following as she pushes through the doors, and Theon is dimly aware of his own hands, held up protectively in front of his chest. He tries to glance at the walls for signs, some directions to tell him where she’s taking him, but she doesn’t seem to glance at him at all.

Something about Esgred gnaws at the back of his mind. Not her imperiousness; he can deal with that, he’s almost grateful for it. Something else, the same feeling he got when he realized she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

“Greyjoy,” says a man’s voice.

Theon turns and finds Jon Snow striding up the corridor toward them. He glances back and finds that Esgred hasn’t turned around, that she’s still walking away.

“Wait.” He’s startled to realize the plea came from him.

Esgred stops and turns. Snow does not stop; he reaches for Theon’s shoulders and holds him in place, the inverse of the careful inventory Ned and Robb displayed today. He stares Theon in the eyes.

“He’s going to live,” Snow says.

Theon blinks. “Your dad?”

Snow shakes him once. “He’s going to live. And that’s the only reason I’m not going to kill you after what you did to Robb.”

Well, Jon’s just as intense as ever.

There’s a sound of metal from behind Theon and Esgred says cheerfully, “Remove your hands. Before I remove them for you.”

Even before he turns around, he knows what he’s going to see. Esgred has her trident out again, and its audible sharpness makes it even more threatening in the ugly fluorescent light of the Barrowlands hospital. As Theon watches, she reaches towards him with it and places the staff on Jon’s wrist, gently.

Jon releases Theon, staring at Esgred. He takes a step back. “What the hell is going on?” His gaze flicks to Theon. “You swim like a torpedo. Your friend carries around a weapon. Robb was attacked by lizardlions, and Arya got caught in a flash flood. What the hell are you doing? Because all of this started when you came back.”

Truthfully, Theon says, “I’m not doing anything.”

Jon says, “Where did you go?”

“I didn’t go anywhere.”

Theon glances at Esgred, who peers through one of the small rectangular windows in the doors and shakes her head.

“This way,” she says, turning to go past Jon.

Jon slides to fill that side of the hallway. “Don’t do this,” he says.

He’s not big, per se, not the way Ramsay was, but he has dark hair and light eyes and he’s staring at Theon telling him not to do something. Theon feels himself start to sweat at the temples and across his scalp now that he's lost the beanie hiding his shaved head.

“Let me go,” Theon manages.

“If you need help you know he’ll give it, he’s—”

The doors they came through open. Robb looks over everyone in the hallway and says, “What’s happening?”

“They’re running,” Jon says.

Esgred shoves past him and down the hallway, still carrying her trident with her. “Come on, Theon.”

Theon feels frozen. She just muscled her way past Jon Snow, but Theon is brittle and fragile and breakable now, and he thinks he’s exhausted all of his strength. He becomes aware that his hands are up in front of his chest and his fingers are twining around each other, twisting like he can climb his way out of this.

Robb’s eyes are still bright blue.

“Then let him run,” he says to Jon, as though it’s the reasonable answer.

Jon stares at him and does not move.

Robb is giving Theon that painfully earnest look that Theon has never deserved. “Where are you going? Do you need help?”

“Dorne,” he manages. He gestures to Esgred, still peering through windows into rooms. “I have—”

Robb’s eyebrows lift. “Do you have money?”

Theon shakes his head.

“How are you getting there?”

Maybe after the flooding, “Gendry’s car” isn’t a great answer here. It would be better, he thinks, to leave Gendry behind and not endanger him further.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly.

Robb bites his lip, pout pinched under his white teeth. His siblings do that too—Arya most egregiously, but Theon has seen the whole family bite down in concert watching Lysa Arryn get out of her car at Thanksgiving.

He reaches into his pocket, gets his wallet out, and begins prying one of his cards out.

“Where in Dorne are you going?”

“I don’t—” Theon begins, horrified as Robb tries to pass him a credit card. “Robb, no.”

Esgred strides back down the hallway. She’s slim, but she fills the place from wall to wall, with or without the trident. “What?” she snaps at Robb.

“You need transport to Dorne,” Robb replies flatly. “And you need money for that. You can buy train tickets, food, whatever you need.” But he doesn’t try to hand the card to her; he continues holding it out for Theon.

Theon has spent a lifetime watching the Starks shell out money for him. And if it’s incidental, that’s fine—if Theon’s just the friend who’s always around when they’re already going out to dinner, maybe he wasn’t aware of it at ten, at twelve. But Ned Stark sat him down and asked him if he had the money to pay to take aptitude tests in high school; Robb casually handed over money for two tickets to a school dance Theon hadn’t known he was going to until that moment. It’s not that Theon never had money, or that the Seaworths ever gave him less than they gave Marya’s sons. He had homecooked meals and leftovers from the restaurant and a steady job and work experience to put on his resume like the rest of them.

But he remembers Robb’s sixteenth birthday, and standing at the back of the crowd (Robb Stark was popular) as the garage door cranked up and up to reveal a shiny red sports car that no sixteen-year-old could be trusted with but the Starks never thought was less than their son’s due. At at the end of the night, Theon got back in his beater smelling of fry oil and drove home, dwelling on how Robb would never need a ride to school from him again.

“I can’t,” Theon says, wide-eyed.

“Please,” Robb says. When Theon doesn’t respond immediately, he begins filling the silence: “Please, take it, Arya has friends in Dorne, they’re at Starfall, there’s a kid named Ned—Dad’s fine and that’s because of you, I don’t know what would have happened without you—and I don’t know what’s going on, but listen to me, if they’re coming after you, I will never tell them. Never. I’ll die first.”

“Robb,” Jon says, slow and warning.

Esgred chuckles once. Theon looks up over the outstretched card, but she isn’t smiling; she’s looking past Theon at Robb and her expression is grim. “Do you think you can be held to that, greenlander boy?”

Robb’s jaw snaps shut suddenly and he glares up at Esgred. “Who have you lost?” he asks, his teeth clenched.

She responds to this challenge about as well as Theon expected her to, which is to straighten her back and loom at Robb from about equal height. “Everyone,” she says quietly, her voice low and dangerous.

Robb lifts his chin, unintimidated even in the face of a warrior with a trident he’s seen her use. He jerks his head at Theon. “I lost him. So there you go.”

“Robb,” Jon says—just sounding tired now.

But it works on Esgred. She smiles. “We can trade this card for transport?” she asks. “You give it without reservation?”

His blue eyes are settling into a suspicious glare. “I don’t know who you are,” he says. “But I’ll give Theon anything.”

Esgred looks at Theon and says, “Take him with you.”

“What.” Theon says.

Robb says nothing, but his eyebrows look liable to fly off his face. Jon, likewise, remains silent, but his face says volumes.

She gives one casual shrug of her shoulder, elegant, and the trident vanishes while he’s distracted by the movement. “Call on your allies. You have a brother who will take you to the ends of the known world—”

“Okay, I know there are cliffs and water but Moat Cailin isn’t really the end of the known world,” Theon interrupts.

“—you have an ally who will give you his material possessions without question and who claims to want to defend you from your pursuers, and you have me.” She jerks her elbow at Jon, who startles, but she does not actually touch him. “And it wouldn’t hurt to have someone else trained in combat.”

“I never said I was going anywhere,” Jon begins.

Robb switches his card to his other hand and begins pulling his phone out. “Are we going to Dorne?” he asks. “Only because if Gendry and I go and Arya doesn’t, we’ll never hear the end of this. Jon, don’t you know someone in Dorne?”

Jon points at Robb and says, “You leave him and Arya out of it. Robb, Dad’s in the hospital, what do you think is happening right now?”

“I’m getting a chance to do this right,” he says, rapidly tapping at his phone. He looks at Esgred. “Do you know where in Dorne?”

“The Empty Land,” she replies. “It was once underwater.”

Robb’s phone begins ringing. He beeps it open, taps a button, and says, “Arya, you’re on speaker.”

“You’re on—what are you on?” This last is said in an undertone, as though trying to avoid being heard.

“Arya,” Robb says. “Arya, listen.” He glances up at Theon, grimaces, and looks back down. “His—he can’t walk. We have to carry him.”

Theon has no idea what this means, because he’s been staggering along on his missing toes and feeling barely a twinge since his saltwater bath, but Jon draws a breath in and widens his eyes.

Arya is silent for a moment, and then she hisses out, “Fuck you, I told you that for life and death, not so you could chase down your high school boyfriend who’s just not that into you!”

Robb turns dark red and does not look up from the screen. Theon feels like he should blush in kind, but his skin doesn’t seem to want to respond. That’s fine.

There’s crackling on the line as Arya blows out a breath. “If anything happens to Dad, I’ll kill you myself,” she says.

“So you’re in?”

“This is stupid.”

“I am… not always wise,” Robb allows.

Arya spits out a laugh. Jon rolls his eyes toward the ceiling and visibly begins praying for the hospital floor to open him up and swallow him. “I’ll tell Mom,” she says. “I don’t think she’ll care right now.”

“No,” Robb says, and it takes a moment for Theon to realize that’s an agreement, not him forbidding Arya to tell Catelyn.

“Don’t tell her where we’re going,” Theon pipes up. As soon as he speaks he feels the eyes on him, but he has to say it; Catelyn Stark never liked him and there’s no reason to believe she’ll like him more now that he’s spiriting her children away from their father’s sickbed and across Westeros.

“Oh, tell her we’re going to see Jon’s friends,” Robb says.

Arya laughs.

Jon, inexplicably, also flushes at that. “Speaking of telling someone something in confidence,” he mutters.

“No, when she comes up she’ll think we’ll mean Sam, and she’ll be busy for a while now anyway. Come on.” He looks at Esgred. “Where do we want to meet? I assume you want to get out of here.”

Esgred nods emphatically and gives a massive pointed shrug at the same time.

“Service area, on the highway,” Robb says into the phone. “Bring Gendry. I love you, I’ll see you there.”

And there goes Theon’s whole vasovagal system. As soon as he hears Robb say “I love you” he starts burning up, useless and stupid and narcissistic as ever, because this isn’t about him except in the ways that it is. He doesn’t know what kind of leverage Robb has over his siblings, what exactly he’s cashing in so that he can take Theon to Dorne, but Arya said “life and death” and Theon burst past that line a long time ago.

Robb hangs up the phone and looks up at Theon. Theon feels his ears burn.

“I didn’t ask,” Robb says, all apologetic and the confidence under wraps again. “Is it okay? Please, can I come with you?”

He feels Esgred’s and Jon’s eyes on him, assessing, judging.

And Theon, well. He’s never been able to say “no” to Robb Stark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me see--we've got a Spider Man reference, a Chrys Watches GOT reference, and some more references to canon quotations. Points to anyone who gets them!


End file.
